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Holiday Special
Friday, October 23, 2020 in 2020
3 minute read
Ah, holiday traditions. Christmas carols, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, fruit cake, egg nog, and change feeze. It’s that time of year again where companies everywhere stop allowing production changes. Let’s chat about this. Change freeze, …
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The Only Metric That Matters
Thursday, October 22, 2020 in 2020
4 minute read
I’ve been a software engineer for a while. When I had the opportunity several years ago to help uncover the core practices needed for continuous delivery, one of the things we needed to know was how to measure the outcomes. There are a bunch …
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Testing 101
Saturday, October 17, 2020 in 2020
6 minute read
Continuous delivery is a way of working to reduce cost and waste, not just build/deploy automation. For CD to be effective, we must identify and fix poor quality as early in the process as possible, never let poor quality flow downstream, and do …
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When to Resolve Tech Debt
Saturday, August 15, 2020 in 2020
2 minute read
If you don’t follow Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery, you’re missing out. In a recent conversation about the challenges of refactoring legacy code, one of the responses talked about when to resolve tech debt. The problem …
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Organizing for Failure
Monday, June 22, 2020 in 2020
4 minute read
I recently saw a documentary on the history of the Ford Edsel. There were so many lessons on the UX research, design, manufacturing, and marketing of Ford’s new brand that apply to developing any product. I suggest everyone look into it. Since …
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Forking, Branching, or Mainline?
Sunday, May 31, 2020 in 2020
3 minute read
A frequent conversation I have is about branching patterns. Legacy development was all about long-lived branches to develop complete features followed by code freeze and merge hell. With continuous delivery, this changes. CD requires continuous …
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Schrödinger's Pipeline
Sunday, May 31, 2020 in 2020
3 minute read
In the lifecycle of most applications there comes a time when they will go into maintenance mode where changes become very infrequent. This is even more common for utility services that are simple, but business-critical to multiple products. There …
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You Can't Measure Quality
Thursday, May 14, 2020 in 2020
6 minute read
“We want our teams to be more efficient and deliver higher quality!” “We sure do, how will we measure it?” The typical response is to apply a thin veneer of seemingly appropriate metrics, add a maturity model or two, and hope …
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Standardizing to Scale
Monday, March 09, 2020 in 2020
4 minute read
Scaling improvement is the siren song of every enterprise. Once we have a team that is able to deliver the outcomes we are looking for, the obvious next step is to define those best practices for the rest of the teams. Then scaling is just a shake …
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DevOps Darwinism
Wednesday, March 04, 2020 in 2020
9 minute read
As organizations attempt to transform, they often focus on tooling or hiring “transformation consultants” as a silver bullet. However, tools are a small fraction of the problem and training teams to Scrum usually results in small, …