The document discusses how high-performing teams deliver value frequently through learning and adapting with high autonomy. It provides examples from Mabl, a software company, of how they achieve this through having no titles, frequent delivery without deadlines or estimation, regular user interaction and collective guidance, automation, observability, and feedback. Key practices include having experience not dictate authority, emergent leadership, interacting with users weekly, consulting many people for planning themes, deploying work automatically and taking rotating on-call duties.

1. Testing, DevOps, and
High-Performing Teams
Stephen Vance
Agile Maine Day 2019

2. let’s talk

3. who am i?
software engineer @ mabl
pre-manifesto agilist
author, speaker, lean/agile coach, product manager, consultant, …
“senior pet care engineer” and “barista”?

4. how do you know a high-performing team?
delivers value frequently
learns and adapts
high levels of autonomy
has the right conversations
respectful and inclusive

6. mabl in a nutshell
no titles
no deadlines or estimation
regular user interaction and
collective guidance
automation
observability
feedback

7. no titles, really?!

8. how no titles works
experience ≠ authority
leadership is demonstrated
management is granted and we don’t grant it
hierarchy exists, but constantly changes, is not commanding, and is emergent

9. team structure
Customer
Vision Values
Capital
9
Leadership
Execution

10. how we scale
10

11. no estimates or deadlines? crazy talk!

12. actually ...
we’ve had three deadlines
1. public beta availability and series A
2. general commercial availability
3. announcement of our enterprise offering and series B
all predicated on press release embargo times

13. user interaction and
“collective guidance?”

14. user interaction
everyone, regardless of role, interacts with users at least weekly
everyone invited to sales calls, demos, customer success calls, training
sessions, co-dev sessions, etc.

15. collective guidance
many people consulted for themes each round of planning
teams organized around themes
themes represent user value
entire team decides how to satisfy the theme

16. automation

17. frequent delivery
~2 years

18. operational responsibility
merges to master automatically deploy to the dev environment
each person deploys their own work to production when it’s ready
rotating on-call duty across the entire product team

19. observability

20. feature usage

21. operational metrics

22. user click streams

23. feature analytics

24. such feedback. wow.

25. high levels of low-level testing
Execution Engine
mablscript
API
Chrome extension
Machine learning pipeline

26. … and mabl tests mabl

27. … and the applications are instrumented

28. … and, oh yeah, communication
code reviews
pair programming
direct, honest interpersonal communication
transparency (everything except compensation and equity)
between everyone (remember no titles?)

29. Stephen Vance
@StephenRVance
steve@vance.com
steve@mabl.com
https://www.vance.com
LinkedIn: srvance
GitHub: srvance
contact me