If you are interested in how our products are built, or learning how we’re applying software engineering practices to delivering our software, then we have some exciting news for you. Over the next few months, we’ll be sharing some articles and open source projects that give you insight into those subjects.
Why Are We Doing This?
Recently, several of us from SentryOne attended a Mind the Product conference. It was a great experience if you are involved at all in developing or managing products. One of the best parts of the conference was getting to see and hear how other people are solving similar challenges to the ones that we face. Hearing their stories reminded me that we can learn a great deal from the experiences of others.
The reminder led to a conversation with Richard Taylor (Twitter | LinkedIn) about what we could do to share our experiences, to contribute to the community that we’ve benefited from. We already have a number of people that speak at community events—for example, there were five speakers from SentryOne at the Music City Tech event in Nashville in September, with three of them being from our Engineering department. But we felt like we could do more, and this post is the start of that.
So, what do we have coming your way? Here’s a small preview.
SentryOne Unit Test Generator
We’re big believers in automated testing (see SentryOne Test), and we use unit tests extensively in our product development. We’ve recently completed a unit test generator extension for Visual Studio that we are releasing as open source. While this is an internal tool, we’re hoping it will provide benefits to anyone wanting to avoid writing boilerplate code in their unit tests. Matt Whitfield (LinkedIn), one of our Directors of Engineering, has prepared a series of blogs on the why, how, and usage of this extension.
Moving to WinAppDriver for UI Testing
We’ve been using CodedUI for driving our full client tests for our monitoring platform for a while now, and never been 100% satisfied with them. Now that CodedUI has been deprecated, the urgency to move to a new platform has increased. Greg Peacock (LinkedIn), one of our Software Development Engineers in Test (SDET), is preparing a series on our experiences moving to WinAppDriver for full client UI testing.
General Software Development
We also have a few general topics that we’ll be posting about over the next couple of months:
- The SentryOne code review process
- How we are setting up OKRs for Engineering
- Lessons learned from our first Innovation Sprint
- How we are progressing on our DevOps journey
- Our experiences using React and TypeScript
- More product samples, like the recent SentryOne Test samples we shared recently
And That’s Not All…
We have some other exciting things in the queue, but I want to save some things to talk about later. If any of these topics interest you, please keep an eye out for Engineering posts on our blog to find these entries quickly. You can also follow SentryOne (Twitter | LinkedIn or me (Twitter | LinkedIn) to get alerted when they are available.
If you would like to sample the results of our engineering processes, you can download a trial of our products, or schedule a demo.
John Welch is the Chief Technology Officer at SentryOne, where he leads a team in the development of a suite of data and BI products that make monitoring, building, testing, and documenting data solutions faster and more efficient. John has been working with data, business intelligence, and data warehousing technologies since 2001. He was awarded as a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) 2009 – 2016 due to his commitment to sharing his knowledge with the IT community, and is an SSAS Maestro. John is an experienced speaker, having given presentations at Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conferences, the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference, Software Development West (SD West), Software Management Conference (ASM/SM), SQL Bits, and others. He has also contributed to multiple books on SQL Server and business intelligence.
