[00:00:00 ] 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 Ashley Hansberger. Ashley is Director of Developer experience at Tackle io. But before I start, let me tell you about my latest project. Awesome cos.com. Yeah. All my work on Culture Views has now its own dedicated home at awesomecodereviews.com.

You find articles about code review best practices code review checklists, news about the latest research on code reviews and of course workshops and courses I offer around this topic. So please hover over to awesomecodereviews.com and check out my latest work. But now back to Ashley.

Ashley is a vivid speaker and proponent of testing, and she loves to share her experience in conferences during blogging, all about testing and engineering productivity.

Before she was working at Tackle.io, she was the director of DevOps engineering at Black. So I'm super, super thrilled to pick her brain today and, you know, learn all about her experience. Welcome to the show Ashley.

[00:01:08 ] Ashley: Thank you so much for having me. I'm, I'm so happy to be here. .

[00:01:14 ] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, really happy.

So I want to start really at the beginning. I know that you have been a tester at the start of your career. Yes. So how, how come that you're now, you know, the director of developer experience, how did you come into developer advocacy and so on, but what's, what's that

[00:01:30 ] Ashley: path? , I'll try to give the short story, but it might become a long and winding journey, but that's okay.

Yeah, I did start as a tester and, you know, went from manual testing and I'm not even gonna say how many years ago, because it feels like ages ago and it was, but that's okay. . So I started as a manual tester and as many companies go, you know, started to learn automation and really found a passion for leading that effort.

So I went from tester test lead. Test architect into really becoming a technical product owner. How do I start advocating the voice of what is needed technically to balance against the features needed so that we can think about how do we design and create the frameworks and develop the automation that we need to get the feedback loops in place for our code?

That kind of led me down to a path of really thinking about testing and continuous delivery and adopting DevOps principles of like flow and feedback and continuous learning and thinking about DevOps from a culture perspective. And once we had a reorg, I was asked to lead release engineering. Now that became a really interesting experience for me, not knowing a whole lot about release engineering, but being able to lead people and thinking about our infrastructure as code and how do we even test our infrastructure.

And guiding a team of DevOps engineers to be able to do just that. As we develop a microservice oriented architecture, how do we create the, the easiest path forward for a team to spin up a service, develop what they need to, and not have to worry about the underlying architecture behind, behind the microservices that they need to create.

So my team creates the Pav road at that point. But what I really found I was most passionate about was bringing people together, learning how to work together and really focusing on people and their experiences at work. I was also asked you, as you mentioned, I've been speaking in the industry a lot about testing.

But what I really found it was about, at the heart of it, was how do we advocate for these ideas and the ways in which we should deliver software? So I was also asked to start thinking about how do we influence an organization through change for an idea that we wanna implement at, at that point, it was agile and how do we scale that across an organiz?

So I got to start thinking about, well, how do we approach change as humans? And, you know, thinking about the, how our bodies and our minds react to change. How do we move through that change, whether it's positive or negative, we, we need to be able to move through it. And I started really getting interested in the psychology of change and how we do that and influence it through other people.

But at the end of the day, we also have to be effective. And what makes effective. Psychological safety. And so I really started developing not just the, well, what are the things that we're trying to do as a team, but, but how do we do that? And what are the things that we need? And so I really got into a deep dive of looking at Amy Edmondson's work and psychological safety.

How do we apply it and learn about our own teams through those mechanisms and start building the, the underpinnings of having an effective. At the end of the day, what I've decided after a lot of reflection was I'm most interested in our experiences as people in tech, because if we are not having a good experience, how can we truly be our best selves?

And if we can't be our best selves, how can we produce something that is really meaningful in providing positive impact to others? At the end of. We might be able to, but it's not gonna be sustainable. So I've been studying on the side organizational psychology pursuing my master's in network.

And I started developing a program around developer advocacy and thinking about our experiences at Blackboard. But through just luck and circumstance was asked to come implement what I've been building over at Tackle io. So I get the chance to start ground up with a fairly new company compared to my 17 years at at Blackboard.

And just start from scratch. And it is so amazing to have the opportunity to build from the ground up with a team that is excited about this change, excited about how we can think about our experiences in a positive culture and sustain what we need through the growth of the company.

[00:05:40 ] Michaela: Yeah, that's, I mean, it sounds amazing and I think that what strikes me the most when you describe everything is.

At the heart, you're describing some internal. Focus, Right. Which, yes. Which I often see developer experience and advocacy and so on. And it's always outside focused. It's like we want our, you know, tool to be used by others. So and then, and then you have all these developer experience professionals and people and, and this focus.

But again, it's a customer focus actually, right. and what you are talking about is exactly that. What I'm so interested in is the internal focus. So not how can we, you know, make a good experience for our customers, the developer , but how can we have a great experience for our internal developers? Yeah. You know, that are, that are making whatever, you know, it, it doesn't have to be the developer products.

Again, it can be something, you know, completely, you know, let's say it's healthcare or yeah, it's, you know, whatever software you're actually producing. But how can we look internally that we have great experience and, and, and, and I think from that perspective, it's so natural that you're coming from the testing and DevOps side, right?

Yeah. Because. There is always enough time to program. Well, because you have to. Right. So , you know this, they can't take it away. We have to somehow program, we have to code. Mm-hmm. . But there is not enough time for testing for DevOps, for pipelines, for ci, you know, for, for making sure that we have a good code base.

We don't have technical debt. We have maybe, Good meetings. We have a good culture. We, you know, we understand each other. These are all the things that we can scrape away, you know, and just bare a minimum. Let's code . Yeah. And, and so I think, yeah. So when you describe it like this, it makes sense that you're, as a tester, arrive at a developer

[00:07:39 ] Ashley: advocacy Yeah.

Role. And think about it as, as a tester early and you know, at the heart of testing, we care about what is the user going to experience, Right? Mm. I got into testing because I cared so much about that user experience. Well, now my users are my, my engineers in the, in the whole program, internal, they are my clients.

And it's not just about the code that's delivered or application that's created. You know, we think about these core experiences that make us effective and productive. And it's not just, did I deliver a. . It's the meaning behind that. Do we understand significance and meaningfulness in our work? Do we understand the positive impact we had?

Do we have variety in the things that we do? That helps us, one, learn and grow first and foremost, but also keep us interested in what we wanna achieve. Yeah, do we have the ability to see it through start to finish? I can't tell you how many projects I started that I've just just ripped off of for somebody else to finish and not be able to see what happened with that.

All of these things that affect like our, our wellbeing and our mental state as workers, you know, really helps drive that experience. And when we can have a good positive experience, we're more committed to our teams and our work and our companies. We become very much tied to the mission of what we want to do.

And we're more likely to stay. So we see higher attrition, we see higher job satisfaction. These are all interconnected things that I'm so deeply fascinated by and want to help just make the best experience possible for anybody. Yeah,

[00:09:16 ] Michaela: yeah, yeah. I did this study that you, read the paper about it, right?

Last year. About developer experience and what, you know, what makes a good or a bad de