In Celebration of Agile’s 20th Anniversary, Executive Vice President Mike Sowers reflects on how software testing and testing professionals have been influenced by agile principles and practices.
Mike Sowers has more than twenty-five years of practical experience as a global leader of internationally distributed test teams across multiple industries. Mike is a senior leader, skilled in working with both large and small organizations to improve their software development, testing, and delivery approaches. He has worked with companies—including Fidelity Investments, PepsiCo, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Wells Fargo, ADP, and Lockheed—to improve development approaches, increase software quality, reduce time to market, and decrease costs. With his passion for helping teams deliver software faster, better, and cheaper, Mike has mentored and coached senior software leaders, small teams, and direct contributors worldwide.
In Celebration of Agile’s 20th Anniversary, Executive Vice President Mike Sowers reflects on how software testing and testing professionals have been influenced by agile principles and practices.
Mike Sowers and Jeff Payne provide some perspective for those in leadership roles to ensure their teams have the right skills in place to deliver on key business objectives.
As another year begins and we look forward, many teams use this time to reflect on all that they’ve accomplished—reviewing things that are working well and things they’d like to improve. A key challenge continues to be automating our testing. Most of us are running to catch up in the test automation space and aggressively […]
Early in the software engineering journey, there were primarily developers. Developers had a wide array of accountabilities: designing, coding, testing, deploying, maintaining, and more. Quality was inherently built in and championed by the triad of the customer, the business, and the developers. As we scaled, we segmented these responsibilities across roles, which came with both […]
Executive Vice President Mike Sowers and Senior Training Manager Stephanie Fender discuss how to implement a culture of continuous learning through learning journeys in our next Coveros Conversation.
One of the key conversations organizations and teams forget about in their transition to agile and DevOps is updating their measurement and metrics plan. Many companies are still using measurements and metrics from the traditional waterfall software development lifecycle. While some of these remain useful, many may not provide value to the team or organization—and […]
I’m often asked about the future of the testing role. Should I change my career direction? What’s in store for testing roles? Will there be a need for quality and testing expertise in the future? As a quality engineer, or tester, or testing leader, where do I go from here? No one has a crystal […]
It can be difficult to find great software testers for senior roles; often, the people you want to hire are the ones who are already gainfully employed. Michael Sowers gives his suggestions for identifying qualified and experienced software engineers who can deliver on senior testing role accountabilities.
I’ve had the privilege (and the many challenges) of working in IT for more than three decades. Early in my career I tended to accept things as they were presented, following the techniques, processes, guidelines, and approaches I was taught by my peers and managers. As I gained experience and wisdom, I became a better independent thinker and started to connect the dots and ask questions.
I work and interact with multiple software development teams. Some are just beginning their agile and DevOps journeys and others are well on their way, but they have many of the same questions or concerns: How do we get all team member roles on the same page? How do we communicate and collaborate more effectively […]