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2022 Reading List
Thursday, December 30, 2021 in 2021
3 minute read
I’m frequently asked what resources I’ve found most useful on my learning journey. Here are my recommendations for both technical and non-technical people who want to improve organizational outcomes. These are in no particular order. …
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What is a Production Issue?
Monday, November 01, 2021 in 2021
2 minute read
Continuous Delivery requires an entirely different mindset from classical artisanal delivery. For example, we always prioritize operations over development. If we cannot deploy something to our production environment, then nothing else matters. …
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Upgrading the Agile Manifesto
Sunday, October 17, 2021 in 2021
4 minute read
When starting on the journey to agility, the most common path is for an organization to hire a Certified Agile Consultant™ and learn about the Manifesto for Agile Software Development followed by Scrum. Then they spend time catching up to the …
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That's Not Continuous Delivery
Sunday, October 17, 2021 in 2021
4 minute read
Continuous delivery is a powerful tool for delivering changes safely, reliably, and more frequently with less toil and burnout. CD is also the best tool for uncovering why we can’t do these. However, this is only true if we are really using …
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Agile Rehab
Sunday, September 26, 2021 in 2021
6 minute read
I’ve been a developer for a while. I’ve delivered using every industry fad that management has bought into. In 2003, the organization I worked for wanted to bring some discipline to our ad hoc processes so they sent senior developers and …
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Development Pattern TLAs
Friday, September 10, 2021 in 2021
3 minute read
There are many common three-letter acronyms (TLAs) used in the software industry; TDD (Test Driven Development), BDD (Behavior Driven Development), DDD (Domain Driven Design), etc. However, there are a few lesser-known TLAs we should be aware of. …
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Choosing the Right Tools
Friday, August 20, 2021 in 2021
6 minute read
Whenever we want to solve a problem or build something useful, we have decisions to make about the tools we choose. Choosing the right tools requires a good understanding of the problems. Often though, there is a tendency to jump to familiar tools …
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Constructive Pessimism
Friday, April 30, 2021 in 2021
5 minute read
Hope creep is the plague of value delivery. We assume that since something worked in the past it will work again. We forget how much pain we’ve had in the past. “How hard can it be to build that? Looks pretty simple to me!” This is …
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The Metrics are Lying
Sunday, March 28, 2021 in 2021
3 minute read
I was talking to a friend the other day about how her management is tracking teams’ “maturity” using “DORA Metrics”, the four measures the correlate with high-performing organizations mentioned by DevOps Research and …
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Scrum or Kanban?
Saturday, March 20, 2021 in 2021
3 minute read
Should we use Scrum? Kanban? Is Kanban for support and Scrum for development? Is Scrum for newbs and Kanban for elites? Are we mature enough for Kanban? These questions are a symptom of the Agile Industrial Complex selling certifications and people …