quality engineering Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

BONUS: Leadership Is Contextual — How a CTO Adapts From 7-Person Startups to 2,000-Person Organizations

In this CTO Series episode, Daniel Harcek shares how leading engineering teams across radically different scales — from a 7-person fintech startup to a 2,000-person cybersecurity company — taught him that leadership isn’t one-size-fits-all. We explore how he builds AI-first organizations, drives agile transformations, and why he believes every person in a company should think like a tech person.

What Works at 10 People Breaks at 100

“Leadership is contextual, not absolute. What works with 10 people breaks at 50, at 100.”

Daniel’s career spans from building a 30-person team for a German startup out of Žilina, Slovakia, to leading 70 engineers at Avast’s mobile division within a 2,000-person organization, and now running a 7-person team at WageNow. Each scale demanded a fundamentally different approach. At smaller scales, you strip away operational overhead and push ownership directly to the people. At larger scales, you need guardrails, dedicated roles, and structured processes that the smaller team would find suffocating. The lesson: don’t carry your playbook from one context to another — rebuild it for the reality you’re in.

End-to-End Ownership Replaces Specialized Roles

“Each engineer owns quality for the task he delivers. And he owns the fact that it comes to production.” Continue reading BONUS: Leadership Is Contextual — How a CTO Adapts From 7-Person Startups to 2,000-Person Organizations

Dave Smith: Democratizing Leadership, Cultivating a Culture of Openness and Improvement in Open Source Agile Teams

“Leadership is not about titles, it’s about action.” Dave’s story on change leadership dismantles the myth of hierarchical leadership, advocating for a culture where anyone can step up. By introducing version control in a volunteer group riddled with anti-patterns, Dave demonstrates how leading by example and involving stakeholders in change processes can foster a positive approach to code quality and project management. Learn how creating psychological safety and inviting feedback can turn the most ardent resisters into advocates for change.

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About Dave Smith

Dave, has over 20 years in training and consulting, having taught Scrum he continues to be active in the agile community, mentoring and helping others who are joining the agile community.

You can link with Dave Smith on LinkedIn.

Julio de Lima: How a QA engineer can help the PO get closer to the team

Being closer to the team, and the user are two important aspects of the PO work in a Scrum team. In this episode, we also about the QA engineer role in the relationship between the team and the PO.

The Great Product Owner: The User-centered PO

A great PO will help the team focus on the user, and understand what their needs are when they use the product. The PO helps the team understand, and focus on the interactions with the product, instead of the code or the technical details.

The Bad Product Owner: How a QA engineer can help the PO get closer to the team

When PO’s work mostly on their own, and share little with the team beyond the basic specifications for User Stories, a gap emerges in the relationship and later in the understanding of the product. But in these cases, the QA engineer can help the PO get closer to the team, and we explore how in this segment.

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About Julio de Lima

Julio is a Principal QA Engineer working for Capco that believes in the Culture of QA. He has been sharing professional insights and experiences on a daily basis and has more than 4500 students in his 4 online courses. In 2020, he was elected the Brazilian Testing reference practitioner.

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.

Julio de Lima: Success for QA engineers and Scrum Masters

Julio is a Quality Assurance (QA) engineer, so we discuss what does it mean to be a successful QA engineer in a Scrum/Agile team. In this conversation, we talk about the need to help the whole team feel responsible for the quality of their deliverable. In other words, we talk about how to get the whole team to think like a QA engineer.

We also talk about the focus on this episode: success as a Scrum Master. In this regard, Julio shares how Scrum Masters can work with QA engineers specifically, to help them improve, and work better with the rest of the team. In this segment, we also discuss some of the pitfalls of estimation.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: People, Process and Technology

Julio’s preferred formats revolve around the triad of improvement: people, processes, and technology. He describes how he usually organizes retrospectives around these three topics, and how teams reacted when he deviated from these 3 topics.

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About Julio de Lima

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.

Julio de Lima: The strikingly different role for QA leads in Agile organizations

As Julio’s career evolved, he started facing a waterfall anti-pattern: the status chaser. Julio’s superiors expected him to be intimately familiar with all the details of what was happening with every team, and every tester in his team. This led to an important personal change for Julio, a change that every QA lead needs to go through when working with Scrum/Agile teams.

About Julio de Lima

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.