Penny is a QA and Dev Manager at Atlassian (an Australian software company), working on an issue tracker named JIRA. Her role is to challenge everything that makes sense, and to come up with crazy ideas that improve Atlassian’s quality and devspeed.
Successful experiments include: improving quality by reducing testing; getting better QA engineers by hiring non-testers; and improving devspeed by increasing the scope of dev work.
In previous roles, Penny’s been in dev, testing, dev-in-testing, IT support, and bellringing for weddings. Her favourite hobbies are eating and sleeping, with travelling a close third.
Dealing with overheads as an engineering leader
There are many super-important roles in software teams that are also financial overhead, e.g. QA, Support and Bugfix. They’re necessary, but they require people that would otherwise be working directly on business goals.
