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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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How Tackle.io Monitors Performance In Serverless

Serverless technology is increasingly being adopted by organizations. According to The New Stack’s analysis of a community survey on GitHub, 75% of users plan to build a greenfield serverless application over the next year. Tackle.io, which has built a platform that helps independent software vendors (ISVs) get their software listed in the cloud marketplaces quickly, is one company that has adopted a serverless architecture. While serverless helps developers to quickly create and scale new applications and services, the inherent lack of visibility into the underlying architecture and how the performance of that architecture impacts users is a significant challenge.

In this Q&A interview with Tackle.io founder and Chief Technology Officer Dillon Woods, we talk about how they have overcome the challenge of monitoring a 100% serverless stack. We also discuss what it’s like building software for other software engineers and how this impacts their expectations, as well as why he believes code monitoring will in a few years become just as important as infrastructure monitoring in the DevOps pipeline.

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DevOps Automation: How to Apply Automation Into Your Software Delivery Process

It seems that nowadays, DevOps can mean many different things. As a DevOps expert at OutSystems, whenever I’m asked what this practice is all about, I like to say that it’s a way to deliver value faster to your end-users. More than a skill, a job role, or a tool, DevOps is a culture-shifting paradigm.

It’s about speeding up the flow of delivering software changes to your production environments and amplifying the feedback loops in your delivery pipeline so that you can catch problems early on during your development stage and act upon them quickly. This is why you always see practices like CI/CD and test automation closely associated with DevOps.

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The Strategy (or Lack Thereof) Around Software Today

Few would argue that, inside an organization, the teams that create software get a lot more respect than they used to.

For years, software was a manufacturing and/or maintenance function that got done out of sight, hidden away in some dark corner of a company. Software delivery was viewed as more of a cost center to be managed than a resource to be leveraged for strategic value. Now, companies rely heavily on the software they produce to perform critical tasks. They expect software to transform their inner operations, to help departments work smarter and improve productivity. Even more importantly, many are betting their companies’ futures on their ability to create innovative, impactful software applications that attract new customers.

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3 Essentials for Releasing Software at Speed Without Losing Quality

Delivering at speed without quality doesn't amount to much.

How to Reduce Time to Market While Maintaining Quality?

How long does it take at your company, from the time someone in sales or marketing comes up with an idea, to the time that it’s making money and adding value to your users? Let’s say it’s a simple change to your software or an added functionality in which everyone agrees that it would be an improvement. And, let’s say that the change would have to be able to support 100,000 users in a 100-minute window. You want to avoid any risk and also design and ship it so that it provides a great user experience. How long would it take to make that a reality? If you think it’s five days, for example, how much time could you possibly shave off that? A few hours? A day? Two days?

You may also enjoy:  Leveraging AI and Automation for Successful DevSecOps 

With any digital transformation, it’s essential to attain “quality at speed” to be able to provide quick solutions with a reduced time to market, but without sacrificing quality. In this hyper-competitive world, the difference is not in who has the best idea, but in who can implement it and bring it to market in the shortest time, in the best way, with appropriate quality.

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Don’t Try This at Home: The Dangers of DIY Toolchain Integration

Remember that time when your partner flagged a leak under the sink and suggested calling a plumber? "How hard can it be," you asked. A few grunts and speculative twists and bangs (and a few choice words) later, not to mention a generous application of duct tape, the leak had stopped. Disaster averted (at least until the problem resurfaced a few weeks later). And it was even worse that time. The kitchen flooded, causing more damage than Vesuvius.

DIY, unless you genuinely know what you’re doing, always comes at a cost. Sure, you can learn to become a better plumber. But plumbing is a specialty — and an expensive service — for a reason. On average, it takes nearly a decade to learn the ins and out of the trade.

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How Do You Know If Your Organization Is Delivering Value Through Software?

 There are no guarantees that DevOps and Agile will ensure that your software products will provide better value to customers – just that your customers should receive the product faster. Speed, however, is redundant if what you deliver doesn’t meet a customer’s requirements. In that scenario you haven’t provided business value — you’ve just delivered disappointment.

 Thanks to Agile sprints and product prioritization, cross-team collaboration, CI/CD and release automation (among other innovations), organizations are building and deploying products faster than ever. In fact, according to The State of DevOps Report, high-performing organizations are deploying 440 times faster (from code commit to deploy).

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Release Manage Workflow Introduction and Installation

Managing a release in which multiple people with multiple roles are involved is a challenging task for an IT team. As the commitment for delivery adheres to time and accuracy, release management emerges as a crucial role in process of software delivery. Release Management is a complicated process for IT teams.

Typically, a Release Manager must perform two major things:

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How Many Architects Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

Looking at the Problem of Responsibility and Alignment

This is how changing the light bulb situation would pan out at a large corporation.

The business, or the Product Owner, would come and say that it was made clear that a light bulb in the living room had burned out. They engage a Solution Architect, who will suggest that the light bulb should be replaced, the BA would validate the voltage and size of the bulb, and the Infrastructure Architect would say that we need to turn off the power before attempting this operation.

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How to Shift Left: Four Tips to Change Team Culture

As the “shift-left” mindset begins to take hold, it is important to remember that embedding key technical practices earlier in the delivery pipeline will only deliver value if all teams are prepared and on board with the change. Continuous testing, for example, is essential and may require more of a shift in culture than technology.

Most shift-left discussions focus on automation tools and techniques. But an area that many fail to touch on is culture. This is arguably the most important consideration of all. Simply instructing engineering and operations teams that shift-left is the new world order is unlikely to get them onboard. What’s more, it risks furthering the silent divisions between siloed teams. This is why a cross-organizational culture must be addressed. If you do the right thinking up front, confronting behavioral and cultural challenges early, your shift-left strategy is more likely to succeed and improve delivery performance. With this in mind, here are four tips and practices to help enable a shift-left transformation.

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Preparation for the Failure

Predicting failures of software in a production environment is very critical, apart from ensuring the quality during the development stage. The failures can happen in many ways, predicting them upfront and ensuring there are solutions for all such failures is a smart way. It will position you ahead in the race.

The preparation for failure should start from the initial stage of software design and carry on to the development and testing cycles. We must keep questioning our decisions in all these stages about the probability of failures and associated solutions.