Software at Scale 53 - Testing Culture with Mike Bland

Mike Bland is a software instigator - he helped drive adoption of automated testing at Google, and the Quality Culture Initiative at Apple.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts

Mike’s blog was instrumental towards my decision to pick a job in developer productivity/platform engineering. We talk about the Rainbow of Death - the idea of driving cultural change in large engineering organizations - one of the key challenges of platform engineering teams. And we deep dive into the value and common pushbacks against automated testing.

Highlights (GPT-3 generated)

[0:00 - 0:29] Welcome

[0:29 - 0:38] Explanation of Rainbow of Death

[0:38 - 0:52] Story of Testing Grouplet at Google

[0:52 - 5:52] Benefits of Writing Blogs and Engineering Culture Change

[5:52 - 6:48] Impact of Mike's Blog

[6:48 - 7:45] Automated Testing at Scale

[7:45 - 8:10] "I'm a Snowflake" Mentality

[8:10 - 8:59] Instigator Theory and Crossing the Chasm Model

[8:59 - 9:55] Discussion of Dependency Injection and Functional Decomposition

[9:55 - 16:19] Discussion of Testing and Testable Code

[16:19 - 24:30] Impact of Organizational and Cultural Change on Writing Tests

[24:30 - 26:04] Instigator Theory

[26:04 - 32:47] Strategies for Leaders to Foster and Support Testing

[32:47 - 38:50] Role of Leadership in Promoting Testing

[38:50 - 43:29] Philosophical Implications of Testing Practices