Young Professional Program

In this episode, we talk about growing talent. We dive into how we approach this as bol.com in our Young Professional Program. Also called YPs. On our recruitment web site, we call this “the IT journey of a lifetime”. Is that just marketing or is there more to it? Guests Bojan Filipovic; software engineer in team Bond, in the content fleet. Just graduated from the young professional program. Martin Cekodhima; software engineer in 4B – financial processing – even sexier than Bond. It’s FinTech in an e-commerce company, need we…

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 14-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Culture Engineering Culture Test automation Podcast

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything The role of testers has evolved in the last decade. Test automation has become the norm. So, testers have grown more towards developers. What are the skills they need to succeed? With the rise of autonomous teams and product teams, more and more tasks of testers moved to other roles like developers. What knowledge must be spread over these roles to ensure that we can release to PRO without fearing what will happen? And there have been other evolutions like the one…

Stop Smashing your Keyboard! Zoom out! Think!

Eduardo da Silva, on 14-12-2018
Category: Architecture, Culture, Development, Events Tags: Architecture Development Culture Design

TL;DR: this article discusses in detail my presentation at Spaces Summit 2018. I talked about the need to stop smashing our keyboards and “blindly” focus on “high-speed”, and start thinking about what we are doing, why and how we are doing it.

Video: How does IT work?

Menno Vis, on 16-12-2017
Category: Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum Culture Autonomy Video

Over 1200 people work at bol.com and our IT department consists of more than 350 engineers, clustered into 60 cross-functional teams. These teams are all grouped in fleets and spaces. Staying organized at this scale is definitely a challenge. To make this happen, we optimize for autonomy, mastery, purpose and ownership

Our agile journey so far – Part 5: Sustaining the change

Menno Vis, on 1-11-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum devops Culture leadership

This is the fifth and last post about our growth story. You’ve read about the history of bol.com and the process they made to reach their goal: landing on the moon. Now we’ve come to the final chapter.

Our agile journey so far – Part 5: Sustaining the change

The Dutch Software Testing Championship

Lucas Verberne, on 24-07-2017
Category: Testing Tags: Testing Community Culture

After the success of Software Testing World Cup last year, the winning team thought a Dutch version would also be interesting. Co-organized and hosted by Dutch Software Testing Association TestNet, the championship took place on May 1st.

Japanese cucumbers, boomerangs and utopias

Roy Jacobs, on 23-06-2017
Category: Culture, Development, Events Tags: Conferences Engineering Fun Culture

bol.com has two speeds of operation: “very fast” and “extremely fast”. In this whirlwind it can sometimes be difficult for teams to share knowledge or just talk about things they find interesting. A handful of colleagues decided something needed to be done about this. What better way, they thought, than to just organize an entire conference by themselves?