Women in Tech Archives - Software Engineering Unlocked

Michaela: Hello and welcome to the software engineering unlocked podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mckayla and today I have the pleasure to talk to Dr. Holly Cummins. This episode is sponsored by IBM. IBM not only produces and sells hardware, middleware and software, but also offers hosting and consulting services. The part that is the most interesting to me, is that IBM is also an active research organization, and an enabler for innovation and transformation. One interesting business area is called the IBM garage – which focuses on accelerating digital transformation, by helping people generate innovative ideas while it also equips them with the practices, technologies and expertise needed to rapidly turn those ideas into business value.

Dr. Cummins was the development practice lead for IBM Garage for Cloud, before becoming an innovation leader in IBM’s corporate strategy team. She drives innovation for companies in various industries, such as banking, catering, retail or even nonprofit organization. She is also a Java Champion, a JavaOne Rockstar, a published author and a regular and vivid speaker. So what should I say? I’m super thrilled to have Dr. Holly Collins here with me today. Holly, welcome to the show.

[00:00:56] Holly: Thank you so much. It’s yeah, I’m really looking forward to our chat.

[00:01:00]
Michaela: Yeah, me too. I mean, my introduction was really, really long because yeah. You have so many accomplishments. It’s really cool to talk with you. So how does that work? Driving innovations for organizations? Can even one person drive an innovation for a whole organization? Or do you need like, that everybody is on board. How do you.

[00:01:21] Holly: I think one person can make a whole organization innovate, but one person can help create an environment where innovation flourishes. I think we’ve certainly all seen the opposite as well. One person, if they do it wrong, can really best innovation across the whole organization. And I think. With innovation. It’s about making this sorts of environments where ideas can grow and where there’s the second, the logical safety for people to express ideas, but then also the organizational tolerance for risk too, to be able to invest in those ideas. But then also I think you need some methodology or, or some rigor to try and. Manage your innovations, because I think a lot of us have as well have seen innovation labs where there’s all these amazing ideas and then none of them actually make it out the door of the innovation lab. And that’s fun for everybody, but it’s not really moving things forward. And really what you need is innovation that matters.

[00:02:29]
Michaela: Yeah. . I’m currently working on a research project where we look at cultures, especially for development teams. How do they have their cultures? What makes them happy? What makes them productive? What makes them innovative and psychological safety and, you know, being able to speak your mind. This is also important. And I conducted a couple of interviews. I also have worked in different organizations and it’s just really tricky, right? I mean, it’s really tricky to be in a work environment and being able to voice your opinion. And some people get really lucky, but a lot of people really struggle with that, I think. And I don’t know if it’s, if it’s bigger organization, I can’t, can’t even say like a bigger organization. It’s more tricky than in, in smaller. I’ve been in startups. So you think, well, innovation should really flourish down. There were like brilliant people on the team, but they’re are also. They take all the space, right. They’re very dominant people. So then all the others conferee so much, then there are like larger organization where you can strive. Is there some recipe that you can recommend for people to, you know, follow to get more psychological safety or do you know, be, be more self-aware if others even can speak their mind or, you know, like, how does that work?

[00:03:40] Holly: Yeah, that, that that’s yeah. Super interesting about the startups. I I sometimes feel at a disadvantage talking about culture cause I’ve worked for IBM, my whole career. And IBM clearly is not a startup. It’s about as opposite a startup as, as you can get in terms of its history. But one of the things that I. Like to talk about, which I think is probably quite related to your, to your research is the importance of fun in the workplace. And I deliberately talk about fun because it’s a little bit provocative because we all have this sort of instinctive reaction that says work is a place for work. It’s not a place to have fun. And so then. I think by sort of choosing something that seems counter-intuitive and then peeling away the layers to talk about why actually that fun environment is really closely correlated to a productive work environment. And I think as well, it’s, it’s quite closely correlated to psychological safety. And I think, you know, the psychological safety manual, certainly doesn’t say let’s have achieved psychological safety by, you know, installing. Ping-pong or, you know, that kind of thing, but, and it’s, you know, and I think what I mean by fun as well, it’s not those sort of that superficial layer of fun. It’s that, that deeper thing where you feel the connection to your colleagues and you feel the work gives you joy.

[00:04:55]
Michaela: Yeah. I also saw that coming up in my own research, but also related research, right. That satisfaction, happiness and productivity. They are really concepts that are very intermingled. ? So engineers also having fun if they are feeling productive and productivity also means connectiveness. ? So a lot of developers that are interviewed, they talk about supportiveness and how they have to know that there is another person that I can. Call or no call before we could walk up to them, but now we call them and they are there and they’re helping us. If you’re stuck, we don’t see the siloed. Right. There’s a friendship coming up as a concept. Right. People want friendship in their workplace. Yeah. I can totally relate to that. I felt really lonely last year working as a solopreneur. And so that’s also why I stepped a little bit away and was taking on more customer work again, because now I’m in teams and I’m feeling, you know, I’m talking to people more and this is really, I mean, it’s also joy and yeah, so I can totally relate to that. How, how do you engage with organizations? So you are at IBM, but you got into different other organizations or is that all internally where you have like little labs that you, you know, that you try to get to flourish?

[00:06:09] Holly: So my role at the moment it’s somewhat internal and somewhat external. We’re always working with clients, but sometimes I’m working with an IBM team who is working with a client, but in, in the garage we were, we were very outward facing client facing. And, and I think there’s, there’s lots of different answers for how do you engage with an organization? How do you change an organization? Right. The, the answer that we chose in the garage is really sort of support at the top and then making the change bottom up. So we would try and get buy-in from the senior stakeholder. And the organization wanted to try working in a new way that it wanted to try bringing some of these, the psychological safety in the innovation. But then also some of the other things that we talk about a lot, like, I mean, agility is an overused word, but that, you know, that ability to respond to change that, that tolerance for risk. But I think sometimes know. If if we try and make that change only at the top level, then it just ends up being as a lot of words on slides and so in. And, and there’s a lot of resistance to these ideas as well because people work in the way they work for a good reason. It’s not like everybody’s sort of set out and said, I know we’re going to make our organizational cut culture so that it, you know, crushes the spirit and destroys productivity. You know, the intention was always to, you know, to try and achieve something good. It’s just that the side effects. Yeah. We’re not good. So then what we do is we work with a particular team on a particular project, and we say, we’re going to, we’re going to do this particular thing and we’re gonna get a result and we’re going to do it in this new way. And you can see that while we work in this way. Actually good things are happening, not bad things. And bringing in dev ops, for example, hasn’t increased the, the odds of something bad happening. Look, we can show you it’s reduced the odds of something bad happening, and look, it’s actually made the process more rigorous, even though the process is also more seamless. And so if we can do it on this one project, that’s maybe not super business critical, let’s try and now expand it to the next project that maybe is a bit more business critical. That, that ripple I would affect because I mean, I think success is the best evidence. And so when you can do something and show the results, then that makes people much more keen to try it for themselves.

[00:08:32]
Michaela: Yeah. So you are coming in and then you’re working with one team. And is it only you, or is it you and the team that’s working with that other team with that project? How does that work?

[00:08:41] Holly: Usually we’d have a team. And I think the, sort of the, at that teamwork aspect is, is so important. I think going back a bit to what you were saying about the lockdown that even the most introverted developer, I think, you know, we, we get something. Team and the, the effects are much better as well. So we try and have really diverse teams in terms of the skills and the disciplines of the people. So normally what we would have is we’d have a handful of developers. We’d have maybe some, some architecture support. But then we’d also have designers who are really making sure that we’re focusing on. The humans using the technology rather than just look, it’s a thing and it’s shiny and I can install it and I can write code on it. And so I’m happy, you know, trying to sort of reel it back, but I’m glad you’re having fun Holly, but how are we making life better for someone else? And, you know, what’s good. You know, cause success for any software project. It’s not just, I did code success is something is better somewhere either at a business level or, you know, at a user level or that kind of thing. So on, on our side, we try and have this really diverse team, but then we also want to make sure that we’re co-creating with the client. So our ideal is that they’re bringing their developers along. They’re bringing their architects along. They’re bringing their designers along as well. And then they’re bringing a product owner because they’re the one who owns the vision for what we’re trying to do. And then that means that as well as making the thing we’re doing a skills transfer. And so I when I was first working in the garage, one of our, the the IBM sellers who we were working with got a bit grumpy because the, the sort of model that they had done was that we would do a thing and then they would sell training for the thing. And because we were. Co-creating that training just sort of happened on, on the job and it didn’t slow anything down. So we would be pair programming and that knowledge transfer would happen. And it would happen in both ways as well. So we, we know things about the carriage method that we can share. We know things about test-driven development dev ops, but then, you know, they’re going to know things. Or organizational context to say, ah, yes. When you want to do this, you need to tell, talk to Bob on the second floor. And so having the person who knows that pairing with you means that you don’t sort of have to go through this elaborate process of I’m stuck. Who do I talk to you? And then, you know, try and figure it out. And they know things about their, their business domain as well. And you know, the sort of the, some of these problems are really quite specific and niche. And, you know, you couldn’t have just a general consultant go in and solve it without doing that. Co-creation. Yeah.

[00:11:24]
Michaela: And how long are those engagements normally until there is some transformation and some knowledge transfer, how long does it take

[00:11:31] Holly: for the license? I don’t think the sweet spot is about six weeks, so that’s, that’s long enough to do something that’s really meaningful to get an MVP, but it’s short enough. That an organization will feel okay with the risk. Cause, you know, if we, if we sort of say, and, and, and as well, you want to make sure that at the end of it, those results are going out and are really visible. So having that short cycle and then say, okay, and if we’ve done it once and you like it now, let’s do it again because. You saw that result and it wasn’t this sort of really protracted process where it took 12 months to see any change. Yeah.

[00:12:10]
Michaela: So you are mentioning already a couple of development practices, like Def ops test driven development, and you have, I mean, the development practice lead for IBM garage. So. Do you think, what are some of the development practices that you recommend that really everybody should do? Is it like peer programming? You also mentioned that or code reviews. What about testing? Do you think this is crucial? Do they have to do it? Can we just do it a little bit? Or can we just skip some of those things?

[00:12:40] Holly: Yeah. We sometimes have conversations about testing because. The there’s a trade-off I think between doing something quickly and failing fast and getting that rapid feedback and not over-engineering while you’re doing that and the enormous benefits of testing. So sometimes if we’re doing something that we know is going to be throw away, and I think there’s a lot of value in doing something that you know, is going to be thrown away. That is that, you know, sort of lean startup , methodology, maybe testing doesn’t make sense. But I think in general, The, the benefits of testing are so great in terms of the quality of the code, but also automated testing is absolutely necessary to support dev ops and dev ops is really. Necessary now in order to support any kind of automation and efficiency and any, you know, that, that ability to do those repeated deployments and the ability to respond, to change and to manage risk. Sometimes, you know, you sort of hear these stories of something that goes wrong and then an organization doesn’t have any way to make a change to fix the problem, except either to go through. Lengthy process or to completely short circuit and bypass the process and, you know, have someone secure shell into the effective machine. And then they change the things by hand, which is obviously not going to be particularly robust in terms of the repeatability or the safety or anything. So you sort of get this chain where you. Do dev ops, because I know it gives so much better results in order to do DevOps. I need to have automated testing. If I’m going to do automated testing, I want to do it with test driven development, because that gives so much better quality for the tests and it. ensures the testability of the code and as well, I think one of the biggest benefits of test driven development is really to refine our understanding of the problem as well. Some people call it tested and design rather than test driven development because of that effect that when I sit down, I think we’ll see, what am I really trying to do? How will I really know what I’m successful? Let me write a test for that. And usually what we look for with a test is something that we would have been looking for manually. Anyway, you know, I go to a web page and I see this, or it prints this. It’s always, you know, we’re always looking for some evidence. We just try and encode that, looking for the evidence in, code, which is efficient. Usually.

[00:15:09]
Michaela: Yeah. So test driven development often is I see it a little bit synonym to also unit tests instead of integration tests. But now you also mentioned something like a UI test, for example. So do you have, like, do you make some distinction here and do you think one is better than the other? Do you see that there’s a shift nowadays in industry? I see a shift and a little bit that, what is your perspective on that?

[00:15:33] Holly: Yeah. I mean, I like to do test driven development at, at all levels. So I like to do test driven development for my integration tests. I like to do test driven development for my unit tests. I think sometimes you do get a little bit tangled where you can’t have, you know, you sort of, you, you do your, you write your unit test and then it passes. And then in doing that, you’ve done enough that actually your integration tests is already passing. So then you’re. Catching up with your integration test a bit, but sometimes we do it the other way and we say, okay, I’m going to start with my integration tests. I’m going to get those integration test passing. And then I’m going to fill in a bit with the unit tests. But I think like, I don’t think it’s something that is just for one level. I think if it’s an outcome that you care about and that you don’t want to regress, then there should be an automated test on it. I mean, I, I. I’m a huge fan of contract tests as sort of an intermediate layer between the integration tests and the unit tests. Cause I think sometimes with unit tests, well, integration tests are really expensive to run in any kind of complex environment, especially once you’ve got 60 microservices. Good luck running the integration tests in any kind of regular way. But then with the unit tests, I think you can sometimes get the sort of abdication of responsibility where everybody owns their microservice and they run their unit tests and everything works great. And the system as a whole doesn’t work. And so somebody has to care about that at some point, but then you sort of end up playing this sort of. Sort of pass the parcel of responsibility, where everybody goes more, my services working as designed. And so then an on all the problems happened at the seams.

[00:17:13]
Michaela: Yeah. , my PhD thesis was about playing in testing our plugging systems and how you test them. It was more or less also services, service oriented architectures at that point. Right. And it was pretty new. People were just jumping on that vegan and so on. And I said, well, you know, you were going to get a little bit into travel if you’re, if it stayed the same with how we are doing testing and nowadays but you’re also an expert for cloud computing. Would you say that in the cloud world, somehow testing or in general engineering practices change, is there, do we have an impact we should we or can be developed in a different way, test, deploy everything. Why is said the same?

[00:17:54] Holly: Yeah, I think it has to be different in order to take advantage of the cloud. So one of the things that you’re almost certainly going to want to be doing on the cloud is, is that DevOps it’s that more rapid deployment. And then if you. Deploying rapidly. And you don’t actually know if your code works, then either you’re going to have an enormous issue in production, or actually you’re not going to be deploying rapidly, you know? So we still sometimes see these cycles where something is getting deployed to the cloud, but then there’s a three week UAT phase before anything can be deployed. And so then. You know, that just doesn’t work. It’s a waste of the cloudiness. It almost may as well be on-prem. So, so you sort of get this ripple back from, again from the dev ops, which you want to be doing to the testing to the TDD.

[00:18:42]
Michaela: I also think like we had, we had very strict roles back then. Right. So whatever, like operations. Yeah. The engineers, the software engineers or developers. And we had like the testers, then there was like a time. Now we have this dev ops for, you know, at one point for dev ops, I feel like every engineer was supposed to be a dev ops engineer. And and then we had like the full stack. So you’re not a front end or back end, your full stack, your full stack from front end to back into dev ops to everything. And now I feel people start to struggle with that concept again. No everything because there’s so much to know that there’s not a single person that can be like this end to end dev ops engineer to front end you know, genius. You see dad, like is there, is there again do you see that there are more roles that are forming itself or a person is bringing more Def of engineer and then more of backend, more front end, you know, cloud maybe, you know, even more concepts that we have here.

[00:19:43] Holly: Yeah, that one’s a really tough one. And I, yeah, I sometimes sort of, and I think I sometimes talk to people who ha, who say exactly the same as you, that, that there are too many expectations on me and actually trying to do all of these things means that not only will I not be quite as good in all of them, actually, I’m going to be pretty inadequate in all of them. And are you sure that’s what you want? And so. I think there probably is, is a space for having those specialist roles. But I think part of the issue as well, sort of is there’s an organizational decision about where do you, where do you put the boundaries? Because I think we probably still do want to be saying. That if you are too specialized, it creates organizational friction because it means that you risk becoming a bottleneck or, or the opposite as well that it, you know, it means that you risk not being deployed because all of a sudden, none of the projects our organization is working on, have a need for your skills. And since you only do this one thing really well. You’re just going to be sat around and that’s not great for us cause we’re paying you and it’s probably not great for you either because you’re really bored. So let’s try and have everybody at least be able to do a few things and let’s have people really comfortable sharing their skills as well. Cause I think that comes back a bit to the pair programming and the multidisciplinary teams that maybe I’m pretty sure. Pretty bad at front end, but I know just enough front end that if I’m collaborating with a front end developer, I can bring my something else. And we’re still going to do a better job than if that front end developer was on their own. And we’re going to do a way better job than if I was trying to be a front end developer on my own. And so then you get these sort of complimentary skills in, in the pairs.

[00:21:37]
Michaela: I think we are coming back again to the teams as well, or to the concept of a team. And that people are really strong as a team. Maybe they are. And there was like, I did an interview with it, very senior engineer. And what he said is like, , if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go with the team or with people. Right. And so this was indeed in one of the interviews about productivity and happiness and so on. And I think. I was also talking to Alex from FedEx and she was on my podcast. He’s a testing expert. And she was also talking about these teams where you have like a person that has a strong expertise, but then this expertise somehow overlaps. Right? So you want to expand your expertise to other roles. Let’s say you are a testing expert, but then you want also to understand development a little bit, then you want to understand maybe dev ops a little bit. Right? And so you’re having this. These shapes that are overlapping. And then in the same team, you have a person that is very similar to what you said, right? They are front end expert. And so you’re overlapping in your understanding each other quite a bit. Right. It’s good. If you don’t, if you’re not solely responsible for everything and you can learn from each other, I think learning is also such an important concept for happiness. Do you see that, that people want to learn?

[00:22:47] Holly: Yeah. A a hundred percent, I think it’s, it is one of those things that motivates you at work. Isn’t it is, is that desire to learn and, and, you know, if you just do the same thing every day, it, I mean, it’s, it’s awful. Isn’t it? There needs to be something coming in. And I think you’re right. That, that does come back to that teaming that if you’re working in a team and people have different skills than you, then you’re, you’re automatically going to be learning. And one of the things that I always said about pairing in particular is, you know, there’s sometimes we put sort of a hierarchy on pairing doughy and we say, okay, so we’ve got the senior developer pairing with the junior developer and they’re teaching everything they know to. It always, it always goes in both ways. So as a senior developer, if I’m pairing with a junior developer, often they’ll know a framework I’ve never heard of. And so then they’ll teach me about that and they’ll know keyboard shortcuts. I’ve never heard of. So they’ll teach me about that. And so it’s always that, that two way knowledge transfer in, you know, independent of your position in the hierarchy or how long you’ve been anywhere. Yeah.

[00:23:50]
Michaela: So I hear you talk a lot about pair programming, so. I don’t hear you talk about code reviews. What do you think about them? Do you do them, are they not that important? Do they compliment or do you don’t need them, if you do poor programming, how do you see

[00:24:03] Holly: that? So my, my, my personal take is that one of the great advantages of pair programming is that it eliminates the need for code reviews. And we sometimes talk about You know wait, isn’t pair programming, more expensive. I’ve got two people doing the work of one person and, and, you know, there’s all sorts of reasons why that’s not true, but I think one of them is that otherwise you have, usually you will have a para-pro code review process at the end, otherwise, and that can be really expensive, so it can be expensive in terms of people’s time, but then it can also be expensive in terms of the sort of thing. Bottleneck and the blocker that it creates, and it can be expensive as well in terms of the, sort of the patterns that it encourages. Because if people know that when you put something in for code review, it takes three days to get it back and get it approved. You know, that’s maybe a pathological case, but it’s not that pathological people. Aren’t going to be putting things in every 10 minutes. You wait until you’re finished something and then you send it over and then you get this. Spiral where the person who’s doing the code review gets a mountain of code and they go, Ooh, I’m not, I’m not looking at that until I’ve got a bit of room in my schedule, which is three days later. And then as well, when they look at it, usually. I see a couple of things happen. One is that because it’s so much work, if there’s a really fundamental design problem, either it’s sort of too late and they can’t see it, or they do see it, but they think, oh man, you know, they’ve been working on this for three days. I can’t go back and tell them they should have done something completely different or that they shouldn’t even written any of this code. And so then the sort of the big problems don’t get fixed and. But then you think, well, but I’ve got to show that I did the review. I’ve got to show that I’ve got some value in this process rather than just annoying them by waiting for three days. Let me find the position of the semi-colon line 36. Let me comment on that. Then everybody knows I’m contributing. So you get this sort of bike shedding. And as you can tell, if I find the whole, the process for us one of the patterns that I really encouraged with the pair programming is that you rotate the pairs every day. So that gives you a much deeper code review. Cause I think otherwise you only, you get like one person’s code review, but then you sort of end up where two people can be wrong just as easily as one person or two. Certainly, you know, two people can be wrong. So then on the second day, A third person comes in and then there’s already sort of another built-in code review where they, in order to be able to contribute, they get walked through what was done the day before. And then they’re able to say things like, oh, well, but why did we do this? And here, why don’t we just try this? And it it’s, you know, it’s not a formal review. It’s an interactive sort of getting them up to speed teaching experience, but then it means that there’s this second chance to catch errors before. Developed too much, but I think, I mean, I think you probably are. You’re asking the question cause you, you probably have quite a lot of expertise on code reviews and you’re gonna tell me all the patterns where it does work, which of course it can, then it can work

[00:27:07]
Michaela: with no, no, but I definitely did the recall and realize all the things that you said, because this are definitely really common problems that I also see that teams have. Right. So this is also one of the things by in my view, Teams come and they bring all really everything that you said, right? Like, and this whole chain of how it just doesn’t work. Great. How to process doesn’t work and where you, where you have this waiting time, where then the code reviews are too big, right. Or you’re done, cannot understand them. You still have to do them. What do you do? Right. So this, there is definitely this, this loop that you are describing. Totally recall, because this is, you know, this is the, the problems that all the people are bringing on the table when they’re coming in, when I’m working with it. Maybe what I see, I actually really liked code reviews because of this synchronicity. Right. So you can have them in a very lightweight way. I also see them complimentary a little bit to peer programming, but you definitely have to do them in a different way. Right. And I think what many organizations don’t understand and why we are creating this loop of yeah. Troublesome problems that we have, how we doing is that we don’t understand the goal of why I’m doing this. Right. What do we want to get out of that? And then also, okay, what do I want to get out of that? And how can I shape the process in a way that I’m getting this out of that? Because I really see that they have all these painful drawbacks. Definitely. But they also have like really wonderful benefits. So I think the most important is that you really understand. The pain points that you said very, very deeply, but then also, what can you, you know, what can you do to counteract them? How can you change your practice but, but I see, I see all the things that you say, and I’m actually a big fan of pairing as well. For me personally it’s very draining to do it. Like I love it from time to time, right? Like it’s the best where I feel like. You have your mentor there, or, you know, you have just this connection and the supportiveness with the people. So I totally enjoy it from time to time, but not too often. How often do you do pairing?

[00:29:17] Holly: So what, what we used to do. In the, in the garage is, is we would do it pretty much all day, every day. And there was, there was a few advantages to that because I think one of the, sort of the hardest things of pairing is the logistics. And so then going back to the PA to the code reviews, you know, there’s some circumstances under which pairing just will not work and makes no sense because it’s, it’s so synchronous and asynchronous doesn’t scale. So, you know, you need to have that kind of asynchronous process as well. And if you’ve got Particularly, you know, if it’s something like open source where people are in different times zones and they’re working different schedules and some of them are doing it in their own time, you know, something like pairing it, it, you know, it’s almost off the table to, to begin with. But what we found is if we tried to be. Ad talk with our pairing, which of course works quite well for a lot of teams. We sort of, we never ended up doing it because it would be well let yes, let’s pair today. Yeah. We definitely want a pair today. Okay. So, so maybe after lunch. Oh, I can’t after lunch, I’ve got, you know, I’ve got a thing. Okay. Well we’ll maybe, maybe at two o’clock. Oh, I can’t. And then, you know, we, we settled that we’re going to start pairing at three o’clock, but then something would come up and then somebody would be unavailable. So by sort of defaulting to pairing, we’d keep our calendars free. And it was great actually, because if we got invited to. I’m afraid I can’t attend this meeting. I’m pairing. So if you interrupt me, you’re interrupting my hair as well as it was sort of, it was like this sort of intro we could block your time.

[00:30:43]
Michaela: a couple of organizations that are working with and That we try something out and it looks really, really nice is that you’re doing code reviews on a particular time. And then it’s done by one engineer. Right. But they’re doing all the others can go in and now everything is via suit, right. As are our teams and whatnot. Right. So by that video conference, and so they’re doing this cultural view, right? Everybody that’s interested can join. Right. And those sessions really, really particularly work well. I’m very surprised by that, but I really have good feedback from, from different organizations where you know, you have this casual thing where people know this is happening, right. One person really drives the review and the errors can watch ask questions, clarification questions, or, you know, other things maybe learn just have their fairness. Have you tried something like that? Is that

[00:31:36] Holly: we’ve tried some similar things? Not, not exactly like that, but that, yeah, that seems, seems really good. So we did I mean, one pattern of course is the sort of the mobbing pattern where we say We don’t just want to do it with two people. We actually particularly for knowledge sharing, you know, we want to do it with six people. So let’s all gather around the keyboard or let’s all gather on the zoom, but as well, what we used to find was, again, it’s that scaling that the pattern I described, where you rotate the pairs every day in a big code base. With a big team is still gonna be quite a while before you rotate round. And so then you do need something else. So what we’d sometimes do is on a Friday, we’d do a show and tell session. So it was, it was very similar to what you described actually, but we’d sort of someone would say, okay, well, I’ve just done this particularly evil thing in this part of the code base. And nobody’s sure. Yeah, understand what I’ve done unless I talk them through it, or I’ve just discovered this really counter-intuitive behavior in this library. Let me show you all what it does. So you don’t get called out the same way I did. So it was sort of partly a code review and then partly a, an education session, but it would just be really informal and just whoever had interesting code. Would show it and talk it through the rest of the team and then they’d ask questions and that kind of thing.

[00:32:46]
Michaela: So maybe one last thing that I would like to talk a little bit with you about is because you. You actually transitioned a way, right? From, from being this development lead at the IBM garage. And now you’re an innovation leader in the corporate strategy team. What does that mean? And what, what’s your role there? What do you have to do?

[00:33:05] Holly: So our, our, my role in corporate strategy, it’s really interesting. It’s because I’m sort of in the, you know, we’re sort of a headquarters role, so I’m sort of in the, in the heart of IBM in, in the center of IBM and I sort of get to see a lot of what’s going on and what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to. Really just be the, sort of like a free resource, both people and financial to try. And when we see something amazing that can’t quite happen because there’s some sort of blocker or there’s just, you know, it just needs a little bit of money to, to get over a starting line that we can sort of give it that, that push. And then hopefully. Make something amazing happen so often it’s where if we have a client team and you know, the client really wants to do something and we really want to do something, but just somehow it just needs a little bit of money just to demonstrate to the people who have the large amounts of money that this is really worth doing. And, and one of the things that we do as well, because I think as an industry, we’ve, we’ve moved a lot now, too. Every, you know, we always want to be trying to do things by actually trying them out rather than doing slides. So that that’s not, it was new when the team I’m part of was started. It’s not, it’s not new anymore, but still in a larger organization, you still sometimes get things that fall between the cracks where it doesn’t quite fit in, in anybody’s mission. But that means it’s actually extra important. So then, because, because we’re sort of central, we can bridge those, those internal barriers.

[00:34:39]
Michaela: And do you still have a lot to do with engineering? Do you still develop software or is it more really strategic and leading that you’re doing right now?

[00:34:49] Holly: It’s a little bit of a mix, which I think going back to what you were talking about with the learning and the, and the variety, I think it is good. So it means that whatever, whatever seems most necessary. We’ll do that. So sometimes it’s actually let me go in and architect this, let me, let me go in and out a bit of code. Let me, you know, I’m not a data scientist, but some of my colleagues are data scientists and they’ll okay. Let me fix your model for you. And then sometimes it’s more strategic and more making those connections to say, actually, I can see that this is going on in one part of our organization and something complimentary is going on in another part of my, let me connect those two, and then we’re going to get a better outcome.

[00:35:31]
Michaela: Oh, that sounds like you’re really having a lot of hats. I really liked that when I was at Microsoft, also driving bit innovation there and having all these different hats, like you’re, you’re driving projects, but you’re also doing the implementation. I was mainly prototyping at that time. But it also means that you, as you said, you have to learn a lot. Did it take it a little bit to get used to that role and know what you have to do? Do you have like mentors that help you or is it. Structure around some, formal mentorship program at IBM. How does that work?

[00:36:03] Holly: I think. With that kind of role where, where you have a lot of hats. I think it comes back to, to the team again and the sort of the resiliency and the team. So what we tend to do, because we’re doing challenging things and we don’t know in advanced necessarily what skills will be required is we, we do sort of go around in groups where there’s more than one of us. And then that means that whatever hat ends up being needed, there’s someone who has that hat and then someone else who can sort of shadow the hat.

[00:36:34]
Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. That sounds really a great team to be in. Maybe the last thing really last thing. And then I’ll let you go. Or that I want to talk with you about is there’s the same culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? So, and what it means is that. The culture is of utmost importance. But also it’s a very vicious cycle that, you know, how do you get your culture to apply and how do you get your team members to, you know, like each other or at least respect each other, right. Especially if you have, so sometimes people have I also have that in my workshops when we are, you know, when we are working on these problems, that code reviews create right where we have, for example, very strong personalities in a team with very strong opinions. So it have problems, you know, like giving into, what did you hear? Do you have like do you have like some strategies for that? Do people do something to do, do some coaching or can you help can the team help itself? What’s your experience with that?

[00:37:34] Holly: It’s. It’s tricky culture, because in some ways, some things about culture, you, you can change because you can, you know, sort of start with your small changes and then success is the best evidence. And then you can roll it forward and you can make those little changes to encourage psychological safety. And you can have, if, if the leaders are bought in, then they can make some of those changes as well. But part of it then does still come down to the people in the team. And that is often the thing that is. Most challenging to, to change, but, but even, even people I think are, are changeable. And I think sometimes characteristics that we assume are just this person actually are the context in which we put them as an organization or habits that they’d learned that with the right environment can be unlearned

[00:38:27]
Michaela: or teamed up that makes maybe right or one person creates or reacts, but only two, right. Person, but to really the whole team dynamics. Are you are you a fan of like bonding sessions and you know, we’re people, what a team really can, you know, get to know each other, do you think that’s

[00:38:45] Holly: I really like them, but I think they, they need to be done sensitively because they do end up sometimes not being very inclusive if we. If, if we choose something that half the team love, and then some people are sort of stood there going, well, this isn’t really what I wanted. So I think there sort of needs to be some, some pre-thought to, well, there’s everybody in the team going to like going out to a noisy bar or. Does that actually not work. And I’ve seen I’ve had some good conversations with people actually, when I talk about fun, because sometimes we get these sort of bonding sessions that get put into a team and we say, right, we’re going to have fun. Now we’re going to, you know, do our bonding and we’re going to go out to a bar and some people are going to know this, this isn’t fun for me at all. But then there can be alternative. So some teams, for example, they’ll play a board game at lunch. And so it means that people who need to rush home after school, you know, are after work to get kids from school or that kind of thing. You know, they’re, they’re included and people who don’t drink are included and it’s in sort of at work. So then it feels like an extra nice treat. It doesn’t feel like you’re sort of being required as part of your job to go out and do things out of hours, which some people really object to. And so then, you know, and there’s other things like, like that, or. This is a really old example because w w one of the other things that happened when I started talking about fun is lots of people told me about their workplaces and that the terrible unfun things that had happened. And there was a team and they were sort of there were a support organization, so they would work quite long hours and shifts. And it was a distributed team. So what they would do is AF after five 30, they would all play quake or doom or something like that together. And it was sort of back in the day when broadband at home was a luxury. So you would take advantage of your office network and they were, you know, they were, it was completely you know, a bonding thing. And they were told by management, if you’re in the office after five 30, you have to be doing work, which I just thought was. Incredibly short-sighted on the, on the part of the, that management to say, you know, your, your people are not on your time making the effort to get to know each other better and to work better as a team. And not only have you not, you know, encouraged this and, you know, put in money for cakes or something, you’ve actually told them they’re not allowed to do it. Yeah. Yeah. That’s very,

[00:41:08]
Michaela: very shortsighted. Yeah. Terrible mistake. But sometimes I really like for management, sometimes I really ask myself. How can you make this decision, but you know, different story. Okay. Well, Holly I know we are on time, so thank you so much. I could have, you know, like talked with you another hour, but thank you so much that I could pick your brain about everything, about all your experience and you know, your knowledge that you have. Yeah. It was really wonderful that you have been on my show. Is there something that you want to share with my listeners? Did you think it’s important for them maybe around culture, happiness, fun productivity, maybe a little thing that they can start doing today?

[00:41:49] Holly: I mean, I th I think, yeah, just to sort of think about those, those, those aspects of fun and, and think about how can I have more fun at work? How can I bring more joy, joy, and delight at work, but also how can I make. Those around me are also having more, more joy into life at work because otherwise it becomes a bit one-sided. Yeah, I

[00:42:09]
Michaela: think in general, after Corona, I call it now after COVID right. I just say after, because it’s just nicer to say that I think we really have to come back to thinking more about others. I think we haven’t been thinking. Enough about others before, but I think, I don’t know how it’s in, in, you know, in the UK, but it, at least here, I feel people are more distance because of it. Right. And I really think we should think more about each other and you know, what brings us joy? How can we help others? How can we be nice to others? Right. Yeah. And I think this can bring joy again to yourself, right? If you maybe should think about how can I make the day, a little bit better for my colleague today? Or help somebody? I think this can be a cycle of positivity. I dunno. Like, yeah.

[00:43:00] Holly: Yeah, absolutely. I think we realized one of the things that we realized with, with COVID is how, how much we need others and how it’s, you know, it’s not much fun without others. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:43:12]
Michaela: exactly. I think so, too. So I hope you all can come back together and then really be nice to each other and care for each other. Yeah. Okay. So Holly, thank you so much for being on my show. Have a wonderful. In them. Yeah. I hope I talk to you soon again.

[00:43:29] Holly: Yeah. Thank you so much. It was, it was great fun.

[00:43:32] Michaela: Yeah. It was really fun.

maror:[00:00:00] Um, hi everyone. And welcome to our webinar today on the secret to high quality code. We’re really excited to have you all here with us. Uh, so let me introduce you to Dr. McKayla and the stars of today’s webinar. Dr. McKayla has been helping software teams build high quality software in an efficient and effective way for 10 years. And her mission is to lead teams. So I’m up there full potential through company workshops and team coaching sessions. Leanne is the co-founder and CTO of workout, which is a live data collection and debugging platform. He’s an advocate of modern software methodologies like agile lean and DevOps, and his passion is to understand how software actually works. So when he’s not thinking of code, which is rarely usually diving, hiking, or writing a new workout blog. Um, and so before we get started, I just want to remind you all that we do have time for questions at the end of the webinar. So please don’t hesitate to leave questions in the question box and this will be recorded and we will be sending you the recording at the end. So. You’re on and McKayla, please take it away.

michaela: [00:01:02] Thank you so much for your really nice and kind introduction. I’m really excited to talk with Liren today about, um, high quality code and get his whole perspective on this topic and pick his brain. So yeah, I’m really thrilled to be here. It’s

liran:[00:01:19] great to be here with you discuss so many interesting topics.

michaela:[00:01:24] Yeah, really cool. So in, in the beginning we discussed a little bit, like what should this webinar be about? And we thought like, let’s come up with this idea that we are asking each other a little bit questions that, you know, are burning questions for ourselves or that we very often, you know, encounter. And, um, so I want to start with that theme and I want to ask you about. The challenge that you see, or the challenges that you see that, uh, engineering teams face nowadays, but really moving fast. Right? So there’s like this accelerate the book, for example, there, the Durham metrics are many other metrics around code velocity. So it’s apparently something that we want to do, right. We want to move fast. We want to be productive, but what are the challenges and how can we actually achieve that? So

liran:[00:02:12] I can say from my personal experience as well from pretty much everything I read on the topic, the best way to move faster is to work in smaller units. You mentioned Dora, the Dora metrics and accelerate, and they’re constantly about, you know, roundtrip time for new features and the amount of new features that are being released. And how can we build in it? How can we work in smaller unit to Falk? And the reason for that is because smaller units of work allow for much faster Predix cycles that allow you to learn much more. You get more feedback, you get, you learn every step of the way you learn more often, and you also get delivered more value to the cost, to the end customer on a more frequent basis. And in a way that’s actually driving a lot more value. I guess the biggest challenge is actually, how, how do you do that? How can you keep moving ever faster? How can you deliver in smaller units while still keeping delivery efficient? And I found that one of the best way, the best way to start is quite often culture. And we talked a bit about you, eh, doing some rich recent research for that. So I would love to hear about. What do you think about how best to build a better culture and how to promote a culture that deliver faster and deliver in smaller units folk?

michaela:[00:03:34] Um, I’m a big advocate for, for great, uh, culture, right? Who isn’t somehow everybody wants to work at the company that has a great culture, but unfortunately not everybody is I’m currently actually doing a research project that I that’s. The one that I talked with you about a little bit is on productivity and work culture and the experiences of developers at their companies. And so I’m, I’m doing right now, a qualitative study, a grounded theory study where I’m really. Trying to deeply understand how are people experiencing their work place and what factors are influencing their satisfaction, their happiness, their productivity, and what, what enables them to move fast, as you said, to be productive, to be the best selves. And, you know, there are some factors around obviously release, for example, is one that’s also covered by the Dora metric. Um, how has the release experience? And here I’m not only talking about metrics because. I think on one hand, I’m extremely data-driven. Um, whenever I was working with teams or am working with teams, um, also at Microsoft, we did a lot of the research was very data-driven, but it was also, and this was very, very important for me, always. Um, Kwon qualitative as well. Right? So not only you’re looking at the data, which gives you a very include complete picture, but you’re understanding, trying to understand the whole experience. And so this research study is really looking at the whole lift experience of developers. So on one hand we have like metrics like, um, you know, release cadence or from time to commit or from time to merge and so on. So what what’s very quantitative quantifiable, but on the other hand, you have. Um, the impressions and the perceptions of people around that. Right? So are you feeling better with it are, um, are they feeling worse and the same is true for code reviews and so. A lot of the things can really back to culture and culture is somehow enabler here, right? So we have like this practices around those areas, let’s say release. These feedback loops that we have released is actually a feedback loop. Code reviews are a feedback loop, right? Talking with product management is a feedback loop. How, how seamless, how smooth can we make them? And culture is really an enabler for that. Why is it an enabler? Because if I’m allowed to say, if something is wrong or if I’m allowed to experiment, even experimented with some failures, right? Like I try something out, I try to work different with product management. It doesn’t work out what happens, right? What are the consequences of that? And. And that’s why culture is so important because if people feel that they can experiment, if they feel that they can also express their opinion on it, they will drive more improvement. Right. Um, the research is really a lot about improvement. How, how much improvement can people. Um, drive and they normally know what’s good. Right. They know what’s going bad. Um, or what’s good. And so it’s really about enabling them to act upon that. And that has a lot to do in here. The funny thing here is that metrics are really important to want on one hand, to enable people that we see and that we make it visible that there are problems. But on the other hand, metrics often also hold people back. Because if I’m, if I measured. By one metric. Right? Um, it means that if I’m trying something else, something new, that’s not covered by this metric. It very well, it could very well be that I’m actually slowing down or I’m. The metrics outcomes going down while I’m trying something out. Right. And so the question is really about culture here. Again, how are people handling that? Right? Do I always have to perform to my OKR or KPIs or whatnot, right. The metrics and the goals that set around, or am I actually allowed to experie experiment here with things that might slow us down for a short time when I’m doing the improvements, because improvements are really hard to do without. Short term slowing down, right? Technical debt. How are you going to work on technical debt and still keep the features going? Right? Yeah. So this is what I am seeing here

liran:[00:07:41] that actually brings to mind the analogy from lean production, where you stop the line. When you see something is wrong and you say you have the, you give a individual engineers or individual employees, the. The permission to call it, to stop the line and spend the time and efforts to improve things, even at the cost of lost productivity in the short term, because it allows for continuous improvement.

michaela:[00:08:09] Yeah, exactly. It’s a really good analogy. Yeah. I

liran:[00:08:13] think it’s so important to create. Um, I remember I talked a lot about feedback, but you’re right. It’s critical that it’s not just enough to have feedback, but it’s super critical that the feedback experience is going to be positive. Even if this feedback is negative, it’s important for people to be able to experience. Getting feedback, something positive and in a way that if they’re changing something or developing something, or if it’s a bad product idea that the negative feedback should be, you know, about the, the, the feature about the, the task that this feature was bad, but the person who came up with it wasn’t bad and they didn’t necessarily make a bad choice by, uh, you know, going after this feature. And. People should be glad about getting those so-called negative feedbacks and not attribute them personally. And that’s super important to the culture, to the experience, kind of, how do you go about creating that? How do you go about building that environment where you get continuous feedback and experience is good.

michaela:[00:09:23] Yeah. I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m thinking a lot about culture nowadays and, you know, to. The common sense is always all countries so hard, right? It’s so hard to change. And if I’m in a, in a bad place, you know, it’s a bad place. Um, and I think on one hand, that’s probably true, but I don’t hand now that I’m confronted. So, so a lot with that, and I’m really working a lot with organizations and that they in displaced, I’m thinking about the small things that you can do. And culture really begins now really coming back to something very concrete. Um, I’m all about code review. So culture begins already in cultural views and for example, code root feedback. And to, in my workshop, what I do, I work with people on how to give respectful feedback. And very often everybody thinks like, Oh, but I’m doing this right? Like we are not fighting in the code reviews or whatnot, or, you know, or it’s only instances of that where we are mean, but it’s more, it’s about the collective awareness of not only do I fight with somebody or, you know, is it an unrespectful, but really. Uh, is my mind about value? The value that I can provide to others is the, is my mind about how can I actually, you know, improve the experience of my peers here. And I think this is something that’s often not done, and this is something very small where a team can really. Start actively being more aware of that, more deliberate, more conscious about this. Um, and it starts already by understanding code is really, really hard and everybody has, um, everybody has a time pressure and you know, wants to deliver the features. And a lot of engineers say, well, you know, code review is good, but, uh, I actually have to deliver feature. So what’s about the time that I have to spend on the code review. Somehow it’s missing from my feature work and so on. And so having really empathy around that and the experience of myself, but also off my, off my team, that’s already creating culture, um, and being extremely, um, it bear that feedback, even if it comes from a good colleague that you think like, we are all, you know, good friends and we are really on the same page that we still really take. And this is now again, you know, slowing down, right. It’s slowing down to make sure that I’m phrasing this feedback in a very respectful way, because we know that feedback can sting. Right. Um, and it can be misinterpreted. A lot of the feedback comes through a tool, which means it’s an automated tool. I’m not directly talking to a person. So sometimes I forget it. And we are in this automated way of. Um, you know, looking through the algorithms, finding, you know, let’s say edge cases or whatnot, finding problems. And so if you are in a very technical state of mind, and then we are hammering in our feedback and say, Oh, Variable name is wrong or, you know, or should be different. And then going, you know, taking one step back and thinking, is that creating a good culture? Or can I take this, you know, two more minutes and say, Oh, you know, what about, um, renaming this and even giving an explanation, you know, w really expressing your, your mind. I think. Driving cultural change is definitely hard and, um, comes often also from the top, but there is a lot that teams can do for themselves. And even engineers themselves can ask themselves every day, like, what did I do positive today? Like I’m not only going somewhere in and they’re expecting that culture would be great, but am I actually contributing to, to making a good culture here? Hmm.

liran:[00:12:49] I think it’s so much more critical today as well, working remotely, because as you mentioned, we’re often in that technical state of mind, whether it’s on GitHub doing code review or on Slack or wherever, but behind what’s actually happening is we’re communicating with other human beings. We’re not just no analyzing code and the testing stuff we’re communicating to other human beings. And as we were, many of us are working remotely quite often, or most of the time. We can often forget there is a person on the other, on the other side of it. And sometimes we kind of forget to act with empathy, with compassion, and while we may be factually, correct. We’re not creating a good experience for the person on the other side of that communication.

michaela:[00:13:35] Yeah. And actually about the factually correct thing. I have learned over my, you know, my time in the industry that at seldom leader, Kate seldom Livia are very, very active, you know? And I think sometimes you forget about that and, and this is two perspectives. Cultural views are a place where two perspectives really are, you know, they are, they are the benefit of it. And there are also the problem, right? That you are constantly having somebody that looks at the same thing and say, well, but I’m seeing something else, right? Like I’m seeing technical debt and you say, but it’s fine. You know,

liran:[00:14:15] the thing is engineers so often feel like they’re factually correct. Even whether it’s or not, it’s the case. I just, and quite often we’re not actually factually correct. There is some degree of, eh, you know, afraid. Of common sense and various options. And w there is not one single truth out there, but even if there is even if you there is, and you’re convinced that there is in your, on that single spruce, it’s still communication. And you must not forget that there are other things beyond fact, too, and more often than not, there are actually no facts. And it’s just your opinion, which might be very good and professional, but it’s just an opinion.

michaela:[00:14:59] Yeah, very true. And a lot of the time it’s about strategies. And about the unknowns that you know, that the unknowns unknowns that we actually make guesses and decision and B we don’t know if they are the best ones. And we even in hindsight, we cannot decide like if we could have, you know, if you would have done it differently, would we have a better outcome? We don’t know. Right. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really dealing with that and, and embracing that and maybe reminding maybe something that we can do also, always over time to build this culture is reminding us of that. Right. It’s a little bit like we have to remind ourselves of the central things. We have to remind also ourselves that we are dealing with so many unknowns and that on one hand, you know, we are, I think at, at one point we have to go and say, Well, we don’t know better. And maybe some people disagree here, but now is the time that we are, you know, buying in and going this way together. And I think this is also important for engineering teams, right? So in one of my country workshops last week, for example, I give them a code base and it was, um, it seeded with errors, right? So it has issues and they asked the team to, to find those issues. And there are, you know, they are. Issues about readability, maintainability of the code, but there are also security issues. And so then we had a discussion about, you know, um, so there are a lot of issues. So how are you going to communicate to the person that wrote that code about those issues? Are you going to tell them all of them at once? You know, do we make like a plan around what should be, um, worked on first? And there was, for example, this discussion then between two senior engineers and they were saying, well, once by saying. Yeah. Um, so everybody agreed that, you know, sending them 300, 300 problems at one point is not the right thing to work with this junior. So, um, they were thinking, well, let’s do it in, in phases, but it didn’t, they couldn’t agree. Like if security issues are more important than readability issues or not only readability, but making the code work. Right. So there was this discussion that, well, this is early stage, so it’s, it’s probably a prototype, so we should have to, you know, show. So let’s do it. Make it correct first that it works and then work on the security issues that they had, like they had, there were injection box and cross site scripting products and so on. Right. But in the end, you know, like the whole team was discussing it. They couldn’t really find a way forward. Right. There was one side that was very convinced that, well, these are really critical security packs and they were really critical. And the other was like, well, but it’s, you know, we use it internally right now. It’s a prototype. So let’s make the functionality work first. And so what, there was a back and forth, and I think this was a really nice example of, I couldn’t tell, like, I couldn’t say like they wanted me to be now the referee and say, Oh, you win. Right? Like the security team, Vince, we first do a security or we first do inability, but there is no right or wrong answer. It’s just the strategy that you’re going to do. And probably that you’re not doing, you know, again, not sending all the issues at one is a good one. Um, but then in the end, it doesn’t matter if you do one or the other, as long as the security backs are not coming out right. In, in production. Um, yeah. And, and I think here it’s really important to step back from this discussion at one point and say it’s actually a nonsense discussion. Let’s, you know, flip a coin and do one or the other. Um, yeah, this is what I think about this. So a lot of the things is really. It really depends. And then we have to make a decision and if we made the decision, this is the important thing. And then everybody has to buy in and not like, keep this resentment and say, Oh, the security or pre approach first. Right. And I think it’s stupid. And so that’s why I’m blocking here, which is culture. I think.

liran:[00:18:49] Yeah. So actually it’s not, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because it’s such a big topic. And I mean, so much effort goes into code reviews and often becoming the button neck, both for whoever has to do the code review. And, you know, spend the time and walk and provided feedback in both wherever need, wants to get, just to get this code out there. And they’re just trying to, and, you know, they’ve just finished developing the feature. They just want to check off the it’s been called of you and send it out there. So kind of what strategies should company follow to speed up their code reviews?

michaela:[00:19:27] So, um, I totally agree that code reviews can become a bottleneck and they’re coming with a lot of pain points, but I think especially this. This mindset of, you know, cultivate is just another hurdle. Um, that’s something that people have to work on. Right. So, um, we really have to understand and carve out also, what’s the benefit of the code view? Why do we do it even here? Right. And if the feeling of the engineering as well, I just wants, uh, I want to look good to me and that’s it. Um, then obviously it’s a delay and it’s a bottleneck and you know, the value. Probably isn’t that high because even if the person gets good feedback, you know, if the person that receives it, doesn’t actually want it, you know, what’s the value of that. So I think that a lot of those is really for an organization and for a team to think about what do we want to get out of contribution? And there is a lot of imperative studies also that really show that the benefits like. Um, improved code base, readability, maintainability, um, less, you know, less issues, less facts, defects in posts and pre-releases, um, all of those are happening. Culture-based, there’s a lot of mentoring and learning happening. There is advantage knowledge sharing, but it’s only if I’m open to it. And if I’m very clear about what I want to get out of here, because if I want. Let’s say if I want to find it back, it would be the best to ask a person that’s familiar with the code to be on this code review and not, you know, a junior, but if I want to have this learning expect more in, in, you know, in the center, then obviously I ask somebody that maybe hasn’t seen that code part before, so that they get familiar, that I have knowledge dissemination that I have more people that are familiar about this code base. And I think most organizations. They’re not real bear. They, they hopped on this code review bag and because the hopped on, you know, to pull request, model to development and pull requests and code reviews are not the same. And so suddenly they wrote a pull request and they felt like, Oh, before I pull it in and look at the code and because I’m looking at the code, it’s already a code review. And so now I’m doing code reviews and I want all of these benefits without actually investing I’m investing. And then here it comes back to this slow down. Right. So I have to probably slow down first. Really find out with my team, what is it that we want to get out of code reviews? How are we structuring our processes, our practices, and this has to do a lot, right? Like, depending on the risk profile of this code review, who should be on the code review would ask for feedback, how long should it take them? What issues are they looking for? All of that can actually be designed and very deliberately made. And then you’re getting really a lot of benefits out. But if you’re not doing that, yeah. Then you’re in this state where. He just wanted, it looks good to me. Right? The other person knows you just want that, but still feel a little bit pressure, um, that they have to look at it because if it goes in, they’re also responsible. And so there’s this delay, um, and you don’t want to spend time for it, but you have to, you know, and then you having an, I actually have a, if you look on my website, there’s the code through your quadrant. Um, and this means like it’s, it’s, you have to access and it’s the speed of the process and the value. And this means that you often have them. Organizations that are slowing speed. And low in value. Right? So they are low in, in speed. They’re very slow. They’re bottlenecks and they don’t get value out or that they’re fight fast because they’re just giving out. Looks good to me, but they’re not getting value out of this. Right. But even if you’re waiting for look good to me, Like say half an hour or an hour or four hours, it’s still slowing down your process. And the question is, was it worth it right? If people are not really taking the time to review. So in the end for me, it was probably a very long answer to your question, but it really comes down to what, why do you do code reviews? Right. And do you have to have an answer for that? And probably depending on the code change, the risk profile of the code change and the code change, you will have different answers to that, or this code review. I want that, you know, my junior engineer knows how that works. And so I’m sending it over or this, this code changes about how we are doing the checkout. So I definitely want, you know, two more eyes, um, to make sure that there are no, no defects going out. Right?

liran:[00:23:47] Yeah. I mean, that sounds so complex. Can’t we just automate this and install some tool and get it over with.

michaela:[00:23:55] I definitely parts of it. And I think that a lot of people are, are, are doing stuff that tools should do for them. Right? So they, they, they are mocking on, you know, style issues they are talking about, you know, some, some things that actually study analysis tools could find. Um, or automated code review tools, whatever you want to call them. Uh, in the end it’s, it’s, linters that checkers steady analysis tools. Right. And they are actually much better than, than people. To find certain, certain errors and certain problems with your code, they can actually, you know, they can walk through your code and really find out, you know, if they’re, if, if some code paths are not called and tell you, Oh, this is actually not going to call it. Or, you know, really also back study analysis backs, but they are limited. So it’s, it’s not something, you know, they are not, you cannot comply, uh, replace the, the manual review. But you can replace a lot of that, you know, nitpicking, which is very unproductive and code reviews. Um, it doesn’t matter. Like why would you have an engineer spend time on finding certain types of errors? If a tool could do it automatically? I’m I’m all for automation. I think it’s so important to automate whatever you can automate here. Yeah. Are you using, are you using some automated tools in your pipeline?

liran:[00:25:15] So yeah, we actually adopted a GitHub advanced security. A few months ago at lookout. And it was actually a pretty good tool for us. It allowed us to gain some insights, actually both brought us a lot of insights into some of the other code that broke out and kind of knowing where we might’ve pitfalls, but it also managed ha ha is helping us moving forward, knowing that it could work coder pushing through discussed meeting there. No style checks and best practices, especially when it goes to more junior engineers or engineers or working in environments that are not a strength. Let’s say, I know most of our full stack engineers spend most of their days between a, you know, react and node JS, but occasionally they dive into Golang. And then all of a sudden, they’re not as fluent in, you know, what can go wrong and how should the code views. And some of those arrows can easily be caught by those automated static analysis tools. Also, it’s a very useful tool personally, we’ve, we’ve recently developed support for Ruby and surely within that skeleton of project, we started with Robocop, which is a very, very strict, eh, who bill inter. And that’s actually provided us with a lot of insight and kind of kept us very honest as we were developing the code, keeping functions, very short, creating a very orderly and well structured code. And that’s kind of something that it’s always a dilemma for me when starting a new project. Do you go ahead and spend a lot of time building the skeleton, building the CACD building, building linting. At the beginning of the, you wait for it later on, because you know that later on, doesn’t always get by. And if you’re adding a linter to an existing project, and then all of a sudden you’re getting, you know, dozens of errors, then you might not be, get going around to fix them because it’s too much work and that’s always kind of a dilemma. But for that project, it was a very good experience for us in developing high-quality code.

michaela:[00:27:25] Yeah, that’s really nice. Yeah. There’s also my experience. Like if you, if you add that to an already existing, quite substantial code base, right. It’s just out of hands, right. You will have like all these red flags, orange, whatever, you know, depending on the tool that you have, like different severities of issues. And I always feel really bad because. I know that I’m not going to be able, like to go back and, you know, redo the past. Um, you can do it slowly by slowly, right? Like I’ll voice called removal or at five by refactoring where you say, well, if I’m touching this code, I make it nice again or make it better and you can do it ongoing. Um, but yeah, I also feel like for, for existing code, it somehow has this, you failed here. Um, um, Psychological, uh, you know, by byproduct, but you’d be like, Oh, now I’m seeing what’s all messy and you cannot really do it. Um, yeah. But yeah, it’s good that it worked out. So apparently you could, could you remove all of the issues? Could you work through all of them?

liran:[00:28:26] So we got through, and I think 95% of them ere, there were some, a few areas where we decided that. That code is not going to be the nicest code in the project. And that’s okay. This code is mostly, you know, four, it wasn’t was low maintenance, low complexity, just a lot of, you know, lung functions doing boring stuff. And we said, that’s something we can live with without spending too much engineering efforts, kind of fixing it up and making it look the best.

michaela:[00:28:59] Yeah. So in the interview and the research interviews that I’m doing right now, we talk a lot about technical debt as well, and how people deal with technical debt. And I’m asking different organizations, different teams, their strategies for technical debt. What are your strategies? We have like some, you know, some amount per sprint that you can use on that, or how do you, how do you even. Um, assess the value of working on this, uh, you know, technical, then you were talking like, Oh, we already okay with this part of the code base, but how do you assess that? And on a more strategical, systematic level, right?

liran:[00:29:34] Yeah. So I guess that’s a two part question. And on the one part, we do have a strategy and I can talk about it a bit, but I think it goes beyond that. I found that for you, you mentioned actually early on that nothing in very literal in tech is factual and most of it is opinions. And I think that’s doubly true for a tech debt. And quite often one engineer joins a project and they decide that what’s happening. Much of, many of the decisions have been taken before they joined our tech that there have been wrong. And I would wager basic statement that it’s. Probably the other way around. I mean, if the project is live, if it’s generating value, if that piece of code was walking from when it was written up until now, then chances are the decision to, to do it. That way was actually correct. Or at least descent. And engineers often jump to say to, you know, define tech that because something is not in the latest design pattern or something is using an older technology or paradigm, or maybe simply because they don’t understand something. So often the first thing you have to do when you think of tech that is actually understand what’s going on and truly think for yourself. I truly think about it. Is this truly affected? Oh, is this something you lack an understanding? And actually that’s something we were seeing within Rueckert and with our customers that shook out is quite often used for once you have a better understanding of the code, because you can see how it’s working and you can see inside of it, then you quite often realize that’s not actually that that’s the, I just didn’t understand how it was working. And once you get gain a better picture of how is it working, why is it working that way? And none of the sudden then it makes perfect sense. But obviously sometimes there is real product that there is real tech that they, for the most part, we kind of manage tech debt on a, you know, quarterly on a quarterly roadmap. We have a very. Agile flexible quarterly roadmap while we manage our roadmap, eh, usual, all the rollout. And you also kind of add, you know, a handful of tasks for each team and full of mid-level mid large tasks for each team where they can, whether they should strive for a tech that. And obviously, you know, like that usually comes last in priorities priorities. So it doesn’t always get executed a lot. Depends on the roadmap progress in general and especially on a. Eh, eh, new tasks that get pushed in from the sales team as well, working with customers. And there are always new requirements for improving performance, for a meeting new criteria for giving the best experience with possibly can for our customers. And those often override some of other stuff we have on the roadmap, but we do try to get at least some of the tech that cleared every quarter, just to get a few low hanging fruits with high impact stuff. That’s been bothering us, that’s bothering the team. And also we find that having those, you know, tasks in the queue engineers kind of find time in way to get to them, to get it out of the way.

michaela:[00:32:56] Yeah. So what, what reminds me and what I wanted to ask you in that context is that the original or one of the very early on definitions of tech dad was code that didn’t have tests right from my Confederacy would say, well, it’s tech that if you don’t have tests, because then you really have a hard time refactoring and often, you know, There’s also this new, I was actually, I did a podcast with him, uh, recently on, on, on my podcast and we were talking about it and then he, and he also sat like tech tech. That is the code that has been outlived, but a person that. Wrote it right. And that in our days in our, in our, um, very fast pace or, you know, um, take industry where people will stay two years, maybe at the company, they write code and they actually never really see it in the maintainance pace. Right. So do you see it when they’re writing it? Maybe when you’re releasing it. And so a lot of the, you know, like a lot of the, the. Code becomes tech deck, because the knowledge is actually gone from the organization that, you know, wrote that that code or, you know, can maintain or understand it. What’s your perspective on that?

liran:[00:34:07] So there’s actually a truck out we’ve kind of we’ve wrote and talked a lot about understandability. It’s exactly what you mentioned. It’s about knowledge it’s about if you’re able to understand the software, the code fairly well, then. You’re the new C you can do a lot. I mean, you can get stuff done. I mean, I think the most obvious example of that is, you know, those simple exercises you get on introduction to computer sciences file from disk, Salton array, eh, those kinds of stuff. And you know, those exercises you can usually do right now as a senior engineer in 10 minutes, 20 minutes. And you’re done, but if you were to get the same task within the context of a very large system, especially one you’re not intimately familiar with, then all of the sudden the same tasks can take you weeks. And then you’re going to start complaining about tech debt and lack of knowledge and documentation. And if at the same time, or to give that same task to the two, a person who was one of the founding team of that system, they’re still going to get it done in, I know maybe not 10 minutes, but 30 minutes. And preserving knowledge is super critical. And at the same time, we need better tooling. We need better tooling that would allow us to work with systems that are complex, that we’re not intimately familiar with. Obviously testing is there, as you mentioned, testing is a form of tech that because testing is a Godwin. That allows it to operate in a, in an area where you’re not familiar with. It allows you to easily debug the code that I, you to see it in action. Even though it’s a developing environment, you can see the code running, you could see it in action. You can make changes in a control mirror. We know what you’re changing, you know what you’re going to impact, but that’s at the same time, I think tests can be incredibly expensive. Even more so if you’re not already familiar with the code, so it’s kind of, you know, a conundrum you’re saying the code is not very good because it’s effective because it doesn’t have any tests and it doesn’t understand it, but then it’s going to be very hard for you to add tests to the code. You’re not honest. You don’t understand. I think observability tools, by the way, can provide you with some insights into how the code is walking. Right. Eh, but at the end of the day, nothing beats just debugging the code, stepping through it, see what, see the actual types and values of variables, seeing the inputs and outputs of the system and seeing it in action. That’s the best way to understand the code.

michaela:[00:36:45] Yeah. I think the too, when I was at the university of Victoria in Canada, um, I was doing a research as a bicycle there. And they, they developed a tool. I think at that point was called driver. You will not find it because it was a research tool, right. Not really popular and bad. The tool itself was really cool because it helped you understand cold. Um, my, my research area was called comprehension. And so really helping teams and engineers understand code. And so this tool was made in a way that you could Deepak and it showed, you know, the traces and the values as you just described. Right. But this is like, 15 years back pretty long time. So it was very novel at that point. Right. And so this was really used to understand coach. I think debugging is definitely one of the ways how we understand code, right. That we really go through it and try to understand what’s going on a really interesting resource maybe in that, um, in that regard is also a book that’s coming out from a friend of mine, for the Hermanns it’s called. The program has brain and it talks a lot about cognitive load and code reading. Um, there’s actually a workshop that I’m going to attend today about code reading, um, from her. And, um, yeah, and I think this is really, this is really interesting because it again goes into these different versions of cognitive load and also confusion that you have with code and confusion can come, come from different sources. One is lack. Of your own knowledge, right? So being a junior or, you know, being a senior engineer, you have a different knowledge base. So you can actually go back to your longterm memory and quickly access how to load the file, or you know, how to save a file, how to close a file and so on. And then as a junior, you have to really think actively think about this with means that you’re. Your, your processing power more or less, right? It’s reduced because you have activity after actively think about this. And we can think around four to seven things. So if you’re already thinking about those things, you know, there are only two more things that you can add. And as a senior example, you, you. You have that in your long-term memory. So you have seven things that you can think about. And the interesting aspect here is also the same with what you said about the code base. If I’m familiar with the code base, I can load parts of that from my long-term memory. And I don’t have to use my short term memory. I don’t have to use the processor for that. Right. Um, and so there’s definitely, there’s exactly what you’re seeing here. Um, maybe something else that I want to add here is you said knowledge dissemination. And code reviews are really good for that. Right? So that’s why I’m saying the organization has to understand the benefits as a whole, right? And suddenly if you understand that, well, if I can actually have, have a, a larger part of my team, be more familiar with a larger part of the code base, that’s actually extremely valuable and it will. You know, it will speed up your development process quite a bit. And there are also studies on that around code reviews where we really see that, um, it teams that have code reviews in place. They already have a Vitor understanding of the code base than teams that don’t have. Right. They’re only known only know what they’re working on. Um, and so why it’s slowing you down to do the reviews. It really speeds you up. Once you have to work in this pace, right. Or in this place off the copies, or if somebody leaves, you have other engineers that are also familiar with. With that. And so I think there are other benefits that are really, really, um, really important here. Yeah.

liran:[00:40:19] Yeah. I mean, I’m hearing here speak, it’s obvious. You’re an advocate of code reviews and you’re passionate about it and you’re making great, great arguments about why it’s so important and how the part, the value fit. But don’t people ever come to you and say, I don’t know, it’s slowing me down. It’s making stuff complex. I mean, I don’t want to do pull quest. I don’t want to do code reviews. I just want to skip the whole things and kind of what do you send them?

michaela:[00:40:50] So, honestly, I don’t, I don’t have a lot of people that have this complete mindset. I have a lot of people that would say I really would like to skip code reviews because I don’t have time to do them because my reward system around my recognition and what I’m expected to do is something completely else. And then I have to look at code reviews and, and this is not part of it. Right. So I recall one person, I was just talking with them. Like we could go around that. Right. It was part of the research again, and they were talking about it. How, how is it? It’s really difficult. They actually laugh code reviews and they learn quite a lot and they would have much more, um, much more benefit and would feel better about them. If this would be actively part of their job description and their expectations. But it’s in very many, many organization. It’s. It’s window dressing. It’s like, yeah, we want you to do code reviews and it’s really mandatory and they have to do them. But on the other hand, there is no time to actually do them. Right. And I think that’s, that’s what I see very often. I definitely see people that haven’t had good experience with code reviews that don’t maybe see the benefits out of that. But I also have, on the other hand, I think this is why I’m such a strong advocate for that. I have people, really, a lot of people that have seen the benefits and that have done code reviews in the right way. And, and, you know, with good processes around and with a good culture around that, that they say I would never, ever work anywhere else without code reviews, because it’s a, it’s a mentoring tool. It’s a learning tool. I’m learning so much more. I’m so connected to my team. Right. And not working in a silo anymore, but this needs a certain time of code reviews. You cannot like work on a feature for a month and then throw over like thousands of lines of code or whatever volunteers look at it and give me feedback, right? Like this is not gonna work, right. This is, uh, this is definitely a frustrating experience for everybody. And in this case, I say, get rid of it. You’re not getting anything out of it other than frustration. Um, but also be honest to yourself that you’re actually not really doing code reviews, right? You’re throwing pieces of understandable codes to somebody else that can spend maybe half an hour, an hour to look through thousand lines of code. What are they going to say to you? Nothing. Right. And so maybe it’s really to be about, be honest and say, if I want that, I need to slow down, understand how to design the process. Um, maybe even get help for doing that. Right. And then, and then really do it right. And have so many people that really love code reviews and so many teams that are striving through that. Um, and yeah, so definitely if you know, if they don’t bring any value, then it’s really, I think it’s very often the process that’s just completely screwed up and the culture around it.

liran:[00:43:39] Yeah. And do you find that companies struggled to understand which public was deserved called the abuse versus which, what policies did they have in place to know to solve them out? Sometimes I know sometimes just adding a log line and then you need to go through the same code of your process, or at least by definition, it’s the same workflow as if you’re adding a big feature. So kind of how the companies go around managing the different kind of pollute quests.

michaela:[00:44:08] So I think this is really a part of, I cannot generalize, um, because for some organization it’s definitely valuable to go. Through a pull request or a code review for every line of code that they’re doing, even if it’s a lock line. Right. Um, but then this is a certain type of company and they have certain goals around it and it’s beneficial. I definitely see also, um, you know, organizations that have some code review guidelines in place and it says we have to look at every line and it’s a log line. It makes no sense here. Um, very often here, people haven’t thought about again, you know, what are our goals with cultural views? And if you think about the goals and it’s a logline in, you know, Yvette Yvette site that I can update within minutes because I have a fast pipeline, why would I go through a code review here? Right? Why would I slow that down? What’s the benefit here? Um, so I think that organizations that are more vague about their contribution to practices and process, and really take the time they understand that. Um, and it has to do with risk profiles. Can engineers, do they have like guidelines to work around? Have we thought about this as an engineering team? What are our values? Um, when I was working with Microsoft, we had like, there were, there’s not one code review. Policy, right. It really depends. Office has a different policy than windows. And then even in, in office, you have like different teams that have different policies and so on. And so the teams really thought about, um, some teams would say, well, for us, every line is reviewed. And then other teams would say, uh, well, vs keeping, for example, refactorings if you do a refactoring and you can show it, it’s, uh, uh, And refactoring that has no side effects, then you can just put it in or some teams would do the review after they’ve pushed it, for example. Right. So after, after committed, after pushing and after merging, they’re doing the so. The, the policies really differ. And I’m not saying that, you know, even if the differ for some teams, they were really good for some teams do or not. Um, it really depends how, how honest and how in there and reflected people were around their cultural views. Um, but you can definitely be design and, you know, even have automatic things that help you to decide whether or not something should have a code review. Right. You could buy somebody if you think about conventional commits. Where you have certain aspects in the commit message even right? Even those systems are in place. If you, that you could do here, where it could incorporate some of the risk of something, or you have against that again, as it tools around somehow assess the risk. And that helps you to decide whether or not you need a code review or in what depth you need a code review here, how many people should be under code review. Right. So, so many questions, uh, yeah. Yeah. Touch on what you meant.

liran:[00:47:07] Uh, that’s. Exactly. Yeah. That’s that’s perfect. I think we’re almost running out of time here. So maybe Mo join us, throwing a few questions

michaela:[00:47:16] from the audience.

maror:[00:47:17] Okay. So actually, a few questions did come up. If you guys are ready for it, um, McKayla, we’ll start with you. Can peer programming, replace code

michaela:[00:47:26] reviews. Okay. Um, pair programming. So I, yeah, this is a, this is a very often, uh, asked question and my answer is no, it’s very similar to, you know, can automated contributes, replaced code reviews. I think they are very complimentary here again. So if you have peer programming, um, You’d probably have different cultural view practices again. Right. So very often we talk about code reviews and then code reviews are that thing that everybody does the same, which is completely not true, could be, it can be so many things, right. If I’m looking over the shoulder with somebody and looking at the code at the same time, it’s an over shoulder over the shoulder code review. And so peer programming could actually be one kind of code review, but then you have to ask your, you know, for yourself or your organization again, Do we need more? Do we need like some gatekeeping around that so that we have another person do we need in fairness right around that? If I have two people that are pairing very often, then you have like this knowledge silo, again, that those two people know about the code, but maybe I want other people in that, so we’ll add them. So, um, code review can be, uh, a complimentary strategy to pairing, but I definitely say it should look different, right? For team, the task pairing code review should look different than for a team that desk. Does know Perry. Yeah. Okay.

maror:[00:48:50] Very cool. Um, Leon, I think this one’s for you, what’s the relevance of code reviews for compliance.

liran:[00:48:58] So I think we found that there are a few, few key elements in that I think compliance kind of often requires that, eh, some peer reviews, every change, and I think it goes back to what said about the purpose of code reviews. And compliance for the most part would be focusing on first and foremost general security review, but even more. So it’s an often a question of trust and governance that you essentially know what code is going into the system in a way. I think it’s very different from most of America is been talking about today, about, you know, in depth review, understanding the code and. Eh, me ensuring that you have all the right pieces in place. It’s more about cursory examination that you make sure that you’re not, you’re not changing anything. You shouldn’t be changing that the person is making that commit within the assigned task is working on and within the assigned scope, if there are any changes to security, sensitive area that you go through additional scrutiny. But if those are eh, you know, It’s more about ensuring that whoever is made the task, did what he was supposed to do rather than the quality of the work he did. So that’s a very different thing. And it’s very important again, to kind of. Define the purpose of the code review. Is it just about understanding the scope of the task and the scope of the change, or is it about deeply evaluating it? Giving feedback, mentoring, sharing, knowledge and so on and so forth.

michaela:[00:50:43] Okay.

maror:[00:50:44] Um, and Mikayla, if people wanted to learn more about code reviews, where, where would they be able to

michaela:[00:50:50] go to do that? Okay. Yeah. Um, obviously I can see my website, right? I’m writing quite a bit about code reviews, which would be awesome. Code reviews.com. Or you can also go through my, my link. That’s my name, Kayla gala.com, which is a little bit more difficult for me. We can put it somewhere, but I’m awesome. Code reviews, dot com should have them work as well. And, um, yeah, I also have like a GitHub. A project that’s about code reviews, um, where I’m listing a lot of different resources that I find on the web. So it’s not only from me, but also what I started recently doing is best practices from different organizations. So there are articles where you see like how, um, You know, for example, the Google desk cultivators, or how is, you know, VMware doing code reviews and other, um, resources that I found really valuable as well. I also have like code review checklist there on my guitar profile. Um, so it it’s, uh, the guitar thing. And then my, my handle is M and then Kyla, G R E I L E R. And so, yeah, there, you can find also quite some stuff, um, that, um, that comes from everywhere that I found this valuable.

maror:[00:52:03] That is a wealth of information that everyone should definitely take advantage of. Um, and I will make sure to send out your Twitter handle for them too, so they get it. Um, and on the topic of learning more in the event, where can you learn more

michaela:[00:52:17] about lookout?

liran:[00:52:19] So you can learn more about first and foremost, that’s roka.com, which is our awesome website. We’ve just launched a new website. And so feel free to check it out. Also, you can reach out to me on Twitter at
other school last, and I’ll be happy to chat with you and share more about what

michaela:[00:52:36] we’re doing.

maror:[00:52:39] Amazing. Okay. So then we have one last question here, um, and it looks McKayla like it’s for you. The question is, do we need additional manual reviews or testing if we have a study analysis tools or is

michaela:[00:52:52] that enough? Okay. Um, I think I touched it a little bit on that. So I definitely think it’s complimentary again. Right. So if you have, like, I definitely recommend to have studying analysis, test tools, have static analysis tools, security tools, because they are much more systematic and they they’re defining more issues. They are less error prone. You’re not overlooking something, right. Especially for things that are systematic. As I said, Um, for example, security testing tools are really good or, you know, security analysis tools are really good for injection box, um, where, you know, people would have a hard time and it’s just unproductive for them to look at that. Um, you know, in, in the, in terms of what a tool could do here, but then for example, broken off, um, authentication or just the flow of things that is really beyond the scope of tools right now. Right. So if you’re, for example, sending out. Let’s say that you’re somebody is requesting a password reset, right? So the whole, uh, workflows through dat can be very, very broken and there are no tools that, right. An alpha example can check for that. So that definitely has to be done manually by, by person and very similar in the cultural sense. Right. So, um, there are really good static analysis tools, but there’s always things that just the tool cannot do for you. So they are complimentary, I would say. Okay,

maror:[00:54:18] thanks. So that’s all we have time for today, unfortunately. Um, but hopefully we can also down again cause it’s been great. Um, so thank you everyone for joining us, we will be sending a follow-up email with the recording and McKayla and Leon’s contact information for whoever wants to get in touch with them. And thank you McKayla. And thank you again.

michaela:[00:54:38] Yeah. Thank you so much. Let’s refund.

liran:[00:54:41] Thank you. Thank you.

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