Building Predictable Delivery After an Acquisition
How shared definitions, daily attention to flow, and a sustainable pace helped an engineering organization become more predictable.
Writing on developer productivity, software architecture, and engineering leadership.
Practical lessons on improving delivery flow, building quality into the software-development lifecycle, and using AI without making engineering less predictable.
The Journey: From Coverage Metrics to Behavior-First
The final post in a 9-part series — tying together every lesson learned on the journey from brittle 80% coverage to resilient behavior-first testing.
TDD with AI: Supervising Agents Through Tests
How test-driven development becomes even more powerful when AI agents write the code — tests as contracts, specifications, and the primary communication channel.
Tests as PR Documentation
Why the first thing I look at in any pull request is the tests — and how treating diffs as a communication medium makes code review faster and more effective.
The Behavior-First Mindset
How shifting from code-first to behavior-first thinking transforms testing, TDD, and API design — and why it matters more than ever with AI agents writing code.
Tests as Living Documentation
How well-written tests serve as executable specifications that document what your code does, for whom, and why — and stay in sync automatically.
Testing at the Layer of Behavior
Why testing every class creates fragile tests, and how testing at the behavior layer reduces test count while increasing confidence.
Assertion Chains: Thinking in Behaviors, Not Implementation
How assertion chains and the normalize function let us verify outcomes instead of checking properties, making tests resilient to serialization changes.
Isolating Setup with Builders and Test DSL
How the Builder and Test DSL patterns transformed 50+ broken test files into one simple update when a constructor changed.
When Tests Become a Liability: The Cost of Brittle Test Suites
Why setting a goal of 80% test coverage and testing every class created a test suite worse than having no tests at all.
Open-Water Swim
The story about how the PGA Tour led to my first open-water swim
Hello World
Initial commit; Initialize the blog with the first post. Introduce myself and explain what the blog is about