Friday 9th May’s issue is presented by QA Wolf

👋 Goodbye, Low Test Coverage And Slow QA Cycles

Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. However, getting that kind of coverage — and staying there — is hard and pricey for any team.

QA Wolf gets your organization to 80% automated E2E test coverage in less than 4 months.

They create and maintain your test suite in open-source Playwright. Plus, they provide unlimited parallel test runs on their infrastructure (24-hour maintenance included).

With QA Wolf, AutoTrader’s 80+ engineers cut QA cycles to 15 minutes and saved $600K+ a year in QA engineering

⭐ Rated 4.8/5 on G2

See How QA Wolf Works

Characterizing A High-Functioning Team

— Abi Noda

tl;dr: “In order to understand how individual efforts combine to determine group outcomes like productivity, the authors conducted their research in multiple phases. First, they developed a way to measure collaboration (i.e., who works with who, and when and how they interact). Next, they characterized what it means for a team to be “high functioning.” And finally, they explored the impact of team functioning on other outcomes such as productivity and satisfaction.”

Leadership Management

Impact, Agency, And Taste

— Ben Kuhn

tl;dr: “I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components: Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative / proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you'll succeed. Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won't work well to try. Taste is important both 'in the large' (picking important problems) and 'in the small' (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.”

CareerAdvice

Innovations In Evaluating AI Agent Performance

— Michael Lopp

tl;dr: Just like athletes need more than one drill to win a competition, AI agents require consistent training based on real-world performance metrics to excel in their role. At QA Wolf, we’ve developed weighted “gym scenarios” to simulate real-world challenges and track their progress over time. How does our AI use these metrics to improve our accuracy continuously? 

Promoted by QA Wolf

Management AI

What You Give Airtime To Will Expand

— Wes Kao

tl;dr: “First, the thing you give airtime to tends to grow in importance in people’s minds. This is why you should avoid incepting negative ideas. Ideas are fuzzy until you put them into words, either spoken or written. The longer you give it airtime, and the more you repeat it, the more real and concrete it becomes.”

Leadership Management

Concurrency Diagrams

— Phil Booth

tl;dr: “Concurrency diagrams are very simple and usually quick to create. They force you to put your assumptions in front of everyone to see, including yourself. Sometimes the act of creating a concurrency diagram can change your own mind about how different parts of a system should be sequenced. All you need are boxes, arrows and text.”

Concurrency

Introducing Clerk Billing

tl;dr: Clerk Billing is the easiest way to implement subscriptions for B2C and B2B applications. No payment integration code to write, no UI work, nothing to keep in sync. Clerk automatically updates and stores your customer’s subscription status alongside their user data, eliminating the need for complex synchronization code and the ongoing maintenance it requires. Add billing quick using pre-built components and we’ll take care of the rest. 

Promoted by Clerk

Tools

Hold What You’ve Got

— Mike Fisher

tl;dr: “As you get close to launching something, closing a deal, wrapping up a quarter, etc. there is often a lot of noise in the signals. It's very tempting to follow that noise but more than likely that will lead you in circles.”

Leadership Management

Function Calling Using LLMs

— Kiran Prakash

tl;dr: “While LLMs excel at generating cogent text based on their training data, they may also need to interact with external systems. Function calling allows them to construct such calls. The LLM does not execute these calls directly, instead it creates a data structure that describes the call, passing that to a separate program for execution and further processing. The LLM's prompt includes details about possible function calls and when they should be used.”

LLM

What I've Learned From JJ

— Nathan Witmer

tl;dr: “I recently started using the Jujutsu version control system, and it’s changed how I think about working with code. As someone who’s been using git for nearly two decades, it’s refreshing to gain new perspectives on my daily work and get a sense of what might be possible in the future.”

Git Productivity

Null Pointer #1: The Blame Game

This is an experiment. A bit of fun. We've teamed up with the talented Manu, who has hand-drawn a series of cartoons we’ll publish every Friday.

Most Popular From Last Issue

Principal Engineer Roles Framework — Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec

Notable Links

Cap: OS Loom alternative.

DeepWiki: AI documentation you can talk to.

Klavis AI: OS MCP integration for AI applications.

Kubectl-ai: AI powered Kubernetes agent in your terminal.

SQLFlow: DuckDB for streaming data.