Posts in 2022
  • The Most Ignored Aspect of Quality

    Saturday, October 15, 2022 in 2022

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/pdamsten I was speaking to a friend recently about a production incident he was involved with. He said he noted several things that could be improved to help the team with their response. I asked if a postmortem was …

    Read more

  • Emotional Testing

    Friday, October 14, 2022 in 2022

    Recently someone asked me, “Does code have to be tested by code to be considered tested? Who tests the code that tests the code?” This was in the context of when to write tests. He was asserting that we only want to invest in tests after …

    Read more

  • DevOps or SRE?

    Saturday, August 27, 2022 in 2022

    A few years ago, one of my friends took a new role and talked about the work we’d been doing on DevOps. His new CTO said, “DevOps is dead! It’s all about SRE now!” Someone is missing the point. I had dinner recently with …

    Read more

  • The Most Dangerous Metric

    Thursday, August 25, 2022 in 2022

    Measuring humans changes behavior and often not how we’d like. Some metrics are more dangerous than others. The most dangerous metric goal I’ve found so far in software engineering is code coverage. What’s code coverage? Simply, …

    Read more

  • Optimizing Human Resources

    Thursday, August 18, 2022 in 2022

    The job of management is to ensure that staff is fully utilized at all times. Resources are being paid for a day’s work, they need to head down working for at least a full day, preferably more. Since we are speaking of DevOps, let’s …

    Read more

  • DORA Metrics Tips

    Saturday, August 13, 2022 in 2022

    Since Accelerate was published in 2018, “DORA metrics” have become increasingly popular for measuring IT performance. More vendors are creating dashboards or integrating these metrics into their existing pipeline tooling. However, the …

    Read more

  • SAFe Isn't

    Friday, May 06, 2022 in 2022

    I frequently find myself in conversations about Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and its utility or lack thereof. My opinions are based on both direct experiences in an organization that started using it and from comparing notes with colleagues in …

    Read more

  • Flying Cars are Boring

    Friday, May 06, 2022 in 2022

    Continuous delivery can be a frustrating topic. Those of us who use this workflow will never go back to legacy ways of working. The lack of Fear Driven Development and objectively better results are amazing. We get so much joy from building things …

    Read more

  • Agile Deepities

    Tuesday, May 03, 2022 in 2022

    A “deepity” is a statement that sounds profound but isn’t. “To the extent that it’s true, it doesn’t have to matter. To the extent that it has to matter, it isn’t true (if it actually means anything).” …

    Read more

  • Business Value Isn't My Job

    Tuesday, April 12, 2022 in 2022

    I was recently in a conversation on social media about the role of a software engineer. As a SWE, what you bring to the table is knowledge of efficient algorithms and data structures for general computation. If a company needs domain expert they …

    Read more