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How-to guides, tooling tips and real-world advice for developers and product managers tired of broken software. Let’s fix this mess together.

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Steam punk chart showing trend line of data

Better alternatives to story points for software product teams

Story points weren't devised to measure productivity, but rather complexity. But teams keep using story points as individual or team productivity "score cards". Here's why that's a problem, and what to use instead.

Tammy Lawlor

Product management

Developers need more context than you think they do. Here’s why.

Kate McGinty

Communication & teams

Beyond MVP: Why your most valuable tactic matters

Dave Mosher

Accelerate quality software

Thruster vs Kamal-proxy: Which HTTP proxy is right for you?

Joé Dupuis

Software tooling & tips

Double Takes

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Double Takes

A startup's launched after a new product in record time after Test Double's product coaching. Kudos to Jen Tedrow for her workshops that also unveiled a $2M product idea!

Tammy Lawlor's strategy enabled a global retail client to align their portfolio, boosting product releases from quarterly to 2x monthly (!) and launching two new products plus key enhancements.

Gusto's legacy Rails upgrade succeeded with our consultants leading the charge, fixing 1,700 test failures -- all without disrupting daily operations and completed on time and under budget. Cheers to Steve, River, Daniel, Will and Jake!

We collaborated with client leadership at a popular magazine to implement a culture of data-led decision making — which led to millions of dollars saved or generated. Shout out to Zack Kelly, who identified an e-commerce checkout error causing up to $7 million (!) in lost revenue.

Joé Dupuis audited and simplified Treehouse's AWS infrastructure, cutting costs by 25% and reducing infrastructure from ~40 servers to 3 servers + serverless ECS cluster. Why pay for complexity you don't need?

Shout out to DevOps pros Keith McCanless and Jessie Puls, who empowered dev teams at Mode to quickly and easily deliver both their own infrastructure needs!

Explosion of calendars surrounding a person

How to synchronize JSON date formats for accurate data comparison

Learn how to handle date comparisons in JSON data using jq, a powerful command-line tool. This guide walks you through normalizing timestamps across different time zones and provides practical jq snippets to streamline your data processing tasks.

S Frost

Software tooling & tips

data-engineering

data-science

automation

open-source

Embracing clarity: Shifting away from a culture of certainty

If your organization feels stuck, and you’re continuing to push features that seem to fail in the marketplace, perhaps you’re stuck in the Culture of Certainty. That’s okay, because you’re not alone.

Michael Toland

Communication & teams

communication

product-innovation

professional-growth

teams

Code generation tools are easy to start, but hard to master

Software consultant Daniel Huss has experimented with using Copilot. Here's his review of code generation tools as a developer.

Daniel Huss

Software tooling & tips

ai-ml

How product managers turn ideas into profit (and prevent disasters)

Product managers do more than prioritize backlogs—they help align strategy, reduce waste, and deliver software that customers love, ensuring long-term success.

Test Double Editorial Board

Test Double Editorial Board

Product management

budgeting

kpi

Icon illustration showing a speaker blasting noise that overwhelms a person

Work around Rails schema noise with one weird trick

Discover a simple and effective trick to handle unwanted changes in db/schema.rb on your Rails projects. Perfect for lazy developers!

Kevin Baribeau

Software tooling & tips

rails

testing

Airplane taking off

From aerospace to DevOps: 4 surprising lessons for better software

Think compliance is boring? Think again! Discover how lessons from high-risk industries can lead to high-quality, sustainable code that saves time and money. 🚀 #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment

James Zimmerman

James Zimmerman

DevOps & security

regulatory-compliance

consulting

Getting the exercises in Programming Flutter working

Flutter and Dart have had some updates since the book Programming Flutter was published in 2020. Let's look at the updates that will allow you to get the exercises in the book working.

Josh Justice

Software tooling & tips

flutter

Terminal screen showing Typescript example

A quick guide to TypeScript conditional types

Discover how to leverage TypeScript conditional types to enhance your code's type accuracy and reusability. Get practical tips and elevate your TypeScript skills.

Lewis M Sparlin

Lewis M Sparlin

Software tooling & tips

typescript

automation

javascript

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