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5 Tangible Metrics for the Speed of Software Engineering Teams

Introduction

Firstly,  since we want to discuss the topic of metrics, what does it mean for a software engineering team to perform well anyway? For the purpose of this post let us take the following metrics for a given software engineering team as the fundamental one:

  • Speed of development (try to maximize)
  • Number of bugs (try to minimize)

This model is clearly over-simplified, however, in favor of keeping this post brief, we will use it in this writing. Furthermore, we are concentrating on the technical perspective here. Alignment of business and engineering is crucial for success, however, it is a topic for another post.

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Kessel Run: Smuggling DevOps into the Department of Defense

To fight the wars of the future the US Air Force tasked a small group of software engineers with a simple job - revolutionize the way the military thinks about software development.

The group tasked with this not-so-tiny problem came to call themselves “Kessel Run” after the famed smuggling route used by Han Solo in Star Wars.

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Two Roles | Two Tales

One of the common misconceptions we have is that an agile coach role is similar to that of a project manager role. These two roles are fundamentally very different and come with a differing set of roles & responsibilities.

While a project manager is like a commander in control of his/her team, an Agile Coach acts as a guide, mentor, and facilitator to the teams.

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Improve Your Engineering Pipeline with Value Streams

Software development and delivery are critical. But how do you determine what value you get from all of that investment?

Value Stream Management helps companies improve, monitor, and manage value so they can better visualize how work flows from idea to realization.

On last week's episode of Dev Interrupted, I interviewed Helen Beal, Chair of the VSM Consortium, DevOps coach, author and "flowologist", to understand her research on Value Stream Management. Helen's research can also be found here.

Episode Highlights Include:

  • What is Value Stream Management?
  • How companies can best utilize VSM in their engineering pipeline
  • What is the VSM Consortium and what are it's goals?
  • Technical writing as a force multiplier in your career

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Running Experiments To Create Change

Change is difficult.

And it’s even more difficult if you’re the one trying to make change happen. But as more organizations start modernizing their software development workflows, like going from story points to cycle time, change is something we need to learn how to implement.

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Top 30+ DevOps Interview Questions

Total DevOps Interview Questions and Answers

DevOps is the offspring of agile software development that has been increasingly attracting attention from large enterprises such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Advancements in agile software development also exposed the need for more promising DevOps-related jobs.

Whether you are applying for a DevOps engineer, analyst, or specialist, besides professional skill sets required, a well-prepared DevOps job interview plays a fundamental role in successfully breaking into the industry. 

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DevOps’ing DevOps

There’s no faster way to kill a conversation among a non-technical crowd than to begin discussing DevOps. For many, DevOps is that “technical thing” that IT teams do to automate testing. Or, to paraphrase an actual conversation I once had with a client:

“Doesn’t DevOps use that guy Jenkins to monitor something called technical debt so that we can have a cleaner Git, which somehow allows our Kubernetes to Docker? All I know is that our operations people don’t like it when we release on demand, and our annual software releases just deliver last year’s trends too late.”

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Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery for Database Changes

Introduction

Over the last two decades, many application development teams have adopted Agile development practices and have immensely benefited from it. Delivering working software frequently, receiving early feedback from customers and having self-organized cross-functional teams led to faster delivery to market and satisfied customers. Another software engineering culture, called DevOps, started evolving towards the middle of this decade and is now popular among many organizations. DevOps aims at unifying software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). Both these software engineering practices advocate automation, and two main concepts coming out of them are Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). The purpose of this article is to highlight how Database Change Management, which is an important aspect of the software delivery process, is often the bottleneck in implementing a Continuous Delivery process. The article also recommends some processes that help in overcoming this bottleneck and allow streamlining application code delivery and database changes into a single delivery pipeline.

Continuous Integration

One of the core principles of an Agile development process is Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration emphasizes on making sure that code developed by multiple members of the team are always integrated. It avoids “integration hell” that used to be so common during the days when developers worked in their silos and waited until everyone was done with their pieces of work, before attempting to integrate them. Continuous Integration involves independent build machine, automated builds, and automated tests. It promotes test-driven development and the practice of making frequent atomic commits to the baseline or master branch or trunk of the version control system.

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How to Leverage 9 Digital Product Development Principles to Design and Build Successful Products

According to a 2018 US Chamber of Commerce report, 84% of the small businesses use at least one digital platform to promote their business, while 79% use digital tools to engage with customers and suppliers.

Today, the estimated annual global digital ad spending stands at a staggering $332.84 billion. Closer to home, Americans purchased a whopping $586.92 billion worth of products and services online. 

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DevSecOps: Agile Security in the Face of Rapid Change

Most organizations have a streamlined process in place to create, release, and maintain functional software. However, when it comes to securing the software, things are not as smooth.

Insecure software puts businesses and customers at risk as hackers expose and exploit inherent vulnerabilities. With the world becoming ever more interconnected, loopholes in software prove to be costlier than ever before.

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An Introduction to Cloud-Native DevOps

DevOps, the method of automating processes between development and operations, is one of the essential factors of successfully implementing a cloud-native approach. Since cloud-native has a purpose to reduce go-to-market time and bring more efficiency to companies, DevOps is what streamlines individuals, tools, and systems, contributing to the overall success of the enterprise. This is what makes cloud-native DevOps a logical step towards improved productivity. 

Both cloud-native and DevOps movements are on the rise. Reports and Data predict that the global DevOps market will grow from $4.49 billion in 2019 to $17.27 billion in 2027. 

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Using DevOps During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic we’re all facing this year is transforming the workforce throughout the whole world. As it doesn't seem like we're going back to the office any time soon, looks like companies are going to need DevOps more than ever.

The COVID-19 pandemic we’re all facing this year is transforming the workforce throughout the whole world. In fact, according to Stanford University research, the US has become a work-from-home economy. 42% of the workforce now working from home full-time. While some businesses are finding it difficult to adjust to this modern lifestyle, others went on immediately. Looking ahead, for a large number of organizations, the inability to adapt could be fatal. 

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Are Your DevOps Metrics Aligned With the Business Objectives?

An enterprise-wide Agile-DevOps transformation typically starts with a Vision followed by many items such as articulation of expected business outcome, a Transformation Roadmap, a set of Key Performance Indicators, an implementation plan, and so on. From the enterprise level these items get detailed out to the other levels from a Business Unit, Division, through the portfolio, program, and finally to the Agile-DevOps teams.

A key aspect of this translation is the alignment of the objectives at all levels with the stated business outcome. Business stakeholders and leadership are interested in the outcome which could include risk and cost reduction, higher market share, revenue increase, operational efficiency, and so on.

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13 DevOps Metrics for Increased Productivity

DevOps improves software delivery speed and quality through a list of practices that pursue an agile mindset. The terms that first come to mind when you mention DevOps are continuous integration, continuous delivery and deployment, collaboration, automation, and monitoring.

DevOps means different things to different teams. Some teams are all about automation, while others do things manually and still consider that they are doing DevOps. Some consider it a culture and a mindset-shaper. 

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Deciphering the World of SAP S/4HANA

Update

I published this blog about a year ago after realizing that while lots of the people I was speaking to had started to think about S/4HANA, many of them didn’t have a clear view of the latest versions on offer. (I could count myself as one of that group before writing the piece if I’m really honest.)

Judging by the number of views the page received over the next few months (to be clear: a lot) we can safely say plenty of people felt the same way.

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How Agile Methodology Transforms the Organizational Framework

Agile Methodology

In the ever-evolving tech industry, innovation is the pinnacle for success. Innovation need not be caged to technology; rather the approach for developing technology also needs innovation, hence Agile Methodology. It helps organizations to co-create, converse, and collaborate, which enhances performance, reliability, flexibility, and speed.

Being Agile

The question arises, what it truly means to go Agile? Co-ordination, rapidity, and flexibility are the foundations for Agile. In this evolving technological world, adapting to Agile will transform your business. It will bring transparency and bring the inter-team conversation to the front. The organizations can develop software in the form of increments that are not just faster and efficient but can adapt to the modifications needed by the clients, thereby being transparent to the stakeholders. In Agile methodology, team management and productivity will support the framework of incremental or iterative progress of work priority. The most widely used Agile processes are SCRUM, XP, DSDM, etc. These frameworks are the origin of Agile and are based on adapting to change, which will, in turn, help in achieving success for a project.