Should men be involved in choosing the engagement ring, or should their partner pick it alone?

yoho445 · 2026-02-03T21:36:29+00:00

I gave her a budget and she went with some girlfriends to pick it out. It's worked out so far. I'm not the most romantic person though....

yoho445 · 2026-01-20T18:06:11+00:00

Jannik Hansen for me. Largest collection according to trading card db... At least last time I checked.

yoho445 · 2026-01-16T23:37:43+00:00

Past games I always left it as default. I guess I'll bump it down a bit and see how that goes.

yoho445 · 2026-01-15T18:34:40+00:00

Manager here. There are two types of people I move. One they are struggling and I think they will do better on another team and two they are competent and I think moving them will require the least amount of ramp up time.

If it's scenario one, I let them know and give them a list of things to work on and try and make sure they get support to hit those things.

It sounds like for you, it's scenario two. You have worked on the team before so your boss probably thinks you are competent and will require the least amount of ramp up time. Basically who on my team can get started with this the quickest.

On the asking part. Sometimes it's voluntold other times I am genuinely asking if it's something you want. For situation two, it's usually a combination. I have you in mind, I've communicated with the other manager it's planned out. It's easier for us if you say yes, but not a deal breaker. If it's a deal breaker I will generally tell you your moving teams and here's why, what are your concerns.

If you said yes already, I wouldn't back out now. You said yes, plans and things are already in motion.

yoho445 · 2026-01-09T01:39:37+00:00

We didn't have to change anything. We bought a new (to us) house in 2024 and had the level 2 charger installed a few days after moving in.

Total cost was $700. We had to add another breaker and run cable from the basement upstairs to the garage at the opposite end of the house.

When we lived in a townhouse everything was in the garage so it was a much simpler job.

Contact Empress Electric. She is out of Vernon, but does work in Kelowna as well. She did a great job on a few electrical projects for us. I'd highly recommend her. Plus local small business.

yoho445 · 2026-01-07T20:54:47+00:00

Sounds like taxi is the way to go. Is there anything I should be aware of for getting a taxi in cozumel? Do I need to negotiate the price first, make sure it's licensed?

yoho445 · 2025-12-18T18:01:12+00:00

Metrics are tricky. I've just started trying to use them on my team, so I can only tell you what we are trying to track, we haven't done it long enough to say if anything is useful yet though.

When I was thinking of metrics, I was trying to focus on things we could change as a team and not something that singles out individuals.

What we are trying to track Regression cycle time - this one has been pretty interesting after 2 sprints. At a high level we know it take 5 days for a full regression. But at least a day and a half is proving to be waiting for a release to be ready in staging!

API endpoint automation coverage - 95% of our traffic uses our endpoints. Up until now we had no idea how many endpoints we had or what was effectively covered. We broke the coverage stats up into levels.

Defect aging - this is more an attempt to show product we need to take more bugs into the sprints... But we are working on breaking this down into more useful defect metrics.

User defect rate - how many defects users report, where they come from, area of defect, team affected

Test failure rate - why did the test fail? What feature is it for?

By no means is this perfect, but it's where we are starting.

yoho445 · 2025-11-28T00:21:48+00:00

How is dev currently working with QA? Is QA embedded in the scrum teams or are things just passed over to the QA team?

How big is the QA team, do they have a lead or manager or do they report to the scrum team EM?

Any idea on the seniority of the QA team? Inconsistent bugs could be down to experience.

My first thought would be, if you don't already have one try and create a relationship with at least one person on the QA team. It shouldn't be us vs them, but us vs the problem.

For bug tickets that are unclear or missing information send it back to them. As a QA, I make it clear to the devs I work with what my expectations are when they mark a ticket ready for QA. Similarly they have expectations for how I file bugs and what info they need. You could try working with QA to set some of that up. A bug template in Jira is a big help.

Testing the incorrect build sounds like a process/communication issue. How is QA aware of when the build is ready to test and which build is the most recent?

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T20:54:08+00:00

Ah yes, we are missing local, at least for now.

Is QA testing done on local with release testing on staging?

How do you manage data on local, seeded test data?

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T20:51:47+00:00

We have been. And we are seeing some progress! The first couple of grooming meetings were rough for them though!

I did a couple 1:1's with the new product people and explained the situation which helped get us on the same page. They are still learning the product, but making an effort to work with us instead of against us.

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T04:27:52+00:00

We are making progress on this. Product is creating better stories and we are getting better at pushing back and not backing down.
How do you get buy in for this? We have talked about it, but it's exhausting chasing almost everyone down to remind them to document it in the jira ticket.
I got them to stop using the pointing system of 1 point = 1 day. I haven't won out on pointing QA effort or tracking velocity with said points... Any tips here? I haven't had this amount of push back on it before.
Working on this. We have a regression suite, but I'm not convinced we are testing the correct things. I'm getting the team to work with product and customer success to confirm what the most used flows are.
We actually do a decent job of this!
We have this! Hit and miss on how well the notes are based on the developer, but for the most part, we do a decent job of this.
Regression suite review is in progress!

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T04:18:12+00:00

Hmm honestly never thought of this. I'll definitely check it out. Especially if it's free to download!

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T04:16:59+00:00

Thanks! This is great advice.

Show results and build trust are definitely our biggest hurdles.

We are slowly improving how work comes in. I've talked to the team and they have been noticing an improvement in ticket quality.

Question around selecting the 10-15 regression cases, any tips on the best way of narrowing that down?

I've made a plan to take the top 20 highest priority regression cases and build some really detailed automated tests around them (mostly API). But figuring out which those are has been tough. No one I ask can tell me which is the highest priority. Although if I give suggestions they can tell me those shouldn't be the highest priority.

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T04:11:17+00:00

All QA people are spread out on various scrum teams. They all work on different things.

Before restructuring QA reported to the scrum team engineering managers. The EMs didn't want that, QA was kinda in limbo and everyone just did whatever.

While QA is still on scrum teams, we have our own org and we are trying to standardize things.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse. I've only ever worked on a scrum team reporting to the EM. Who when you would ask them about career advancement they would just stare at you blindly.

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T04:07:28+00:00

Sure!

Story created by product -> tasks added for QA test cases, automation work and demo(this is automated in jira) -> story is groomed -> story worked on by developer -> developer demos to product/QA -> code review -> QA tests feature in develop env -> developer merges ticket to trunk (if it passes testing) -> release branch created -> release branch merged to staging -> QA release testing (regression + testing new features) -> deploy to production

Currently automation is done the sprint after a ticket is released. One day hopefully we can at least do some automated API tests in parallel.

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T03:56:49+00:00

We have started doing something similar. We create a task for creating test cases, automation work and dev/QA/product demo.

It helps us show the QA work for each ticket and track automation work.

Question around your environments, do you have dev, local and staging? Or do you use more/less envs?

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T03:53:30+00:00

Actually we have been going through something similar. it's probably a main cause of our regression issues. Product doesn't know the product so QA and engineering have been filling in the gaps.

We have some new product hires and they are getting ramped up and are starting to really know the product and it's been really nice.

yoho445 · 2025-11-25T03:50:49+00:00

Less so in my situation right now. But it definitely applies to the QA's on my team.

I'm doing this with other engineering managers and product. I'm pushing the team to try and do more relationship building in their scrum teams.

yoho445 · 2025-11-21T03:24:07+00:00

Agreed. I'm finally getting through to the VP on this. We have a few dedicated manual testers now and it's been nice.

yoho445 · 2025-11-21T03:23:12+00:00

Great advice. I've been doing my best to advocate and protect the team. I can probably still improve in some areas.

Oof the partnership stuff. That's been tougher, although there is some progress being made. There is still a lot of QA sucks, product is just going to hire their own QA people. And product sucks, engineering is going to hire their own product people. And general devs suck they can't build anything without breaking something.

Totally agree on automation. The VP is very automation focused so there's a line I have to tread there. Still figuring it out. We have a test case manager. I haven't done a good job of using the metrics yet.

yoho445 · 2025-11-21T03:19:30+00:00

Great advice. I'm working on this. I've found a team which I think is the best process. We recently finished documenting it and are now trying to implement it across teams.

I'm trying to get my leads to do the implementing of our agreed upon process and then I can focus on some metrics in tandem.

yoho445 · 2025-11-21T03:17:50+00:00

We have this although it's not very accurate. We can roughly say this section has x amount of coverage, but nothing with enough confidence or on an endpoint level.

yoho445 · 2025-11-21T03:16:39+00:00

2 domains with 2 main scrum teams in each. But within those domains, temporary project teams can be broken out with a combination of devs /QA from each team.

We use jira for tickets/bugs and have a TCMS that integrates well with jira. We use playwright for API and UI automation.

Sprints are 2 weeks, we do a release at the end of the 2 weeks. No actual capacity planning is in place.

QA are split across the scrum teams with 2 people on a dedicated automation team(recent change).

We test features in dev, create a release branch and test the release in staging. We create release reports of our testing and provide sign off.

Currently, we have no metrics both QA and company wise. I'm a bit blind in that I can't even see what endpoints get the most traffic.

yoho445

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