This post is an excerpt of the Breaking the Change Management Barrier whitepaper by Ron Forrester, Sr., Jayne Groll, Chris Hill, Dr. Steve Mayner, Erica Morrison, Scott Nasello, Scott Prugh, and Rosalind Radcliffe. During an era of rising regulation and linear, waterfall software development, enterprises adopted a rigorous approach to IT’s change-management process in order to regulate releases into production systems and demonstrate auditable Information Technology (IT) controls. (For the … [Read more...]
What is GitOps?
By Cornelia Davis, Chris Hill, Dwayne Holmes, Tom Limoncelli, and Gail Murphy There isn't really clarity in the industry as to what GitOps is. After two days of discussion and consensus building at the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Forum, a team of experts came to the following conclusion: GitOps supports the DevOps agenda in a particularly effective manner (where Git is the interface for operational actions). But that's only the very highest level definition. The following post lays out a brief … [Read more...]
Taking a Fresh Look at Enterprise Business Systems
A group of industry experts tackled the challenge of ERP updating as part of the 2020 DevOps Enterprise Forum. This team (Pat Birkeland, Adrian Cockcroft, Damon Edwards, Chris Kernaghan, Courtney Kissler, Scott Nasello, Ron Olshausen, and Jim Sherwin) was primarily trying to offer guidance to enterprises about how they may think about the impact that digital transformation (DevOps, Lean, etc.) is placing on incumbent business systems (such as ERPs and middleware) within their integrated … [Read more...]
Complexity: The Enemy of Agility and Execution
As companies race to adopt new cloud computing technologies and systems to effectively compete as digital enterprises, they quickly discover that with new systems, applications, and processes comes monumental new complexity. At a fundamental level, legacy systems of record, which are critical to running core operating functions, like Finance, ERP, CRM, and HR were not designed to seamlessly connect with key systems of engagement or systems of intelligence used to create sustainable customer … [Read more...]
Architecture: The Seven Domains of Transformation
Why Is Architecture Important? Architecture exists within applications, solutions, and the enterprise, whether time, effort, and resources are allocated to it or not. Architectures evolve over time just like most processes and organizational priorities. To enable delivery teams to operate at their highest velocity and remove as many impediments as possible, a focus on architectural improvement and streamlining your product delivery capabilities is crucial. You must ensure that the transformation … [Read more...]
Measure Software Delivery Performance with Four Key Metrics
This post has been adapted from Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. There are many frameworks and methodologies that aim to improve the way we build software products and services. We wanted to discover what works and what doesn’t in a scientific way, starting with a definition of what “good” means in this context. This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance. MEASURING SOFTWARE DELIVERY … [Read more...]
Measuring Software Quality
This post was adapted from the Measuring Software Quality white paper, written by Cornelia Davis, Stephen Magill, Rosalind Radcliffe and James Wickett. In today’s digital economy, where software is central to the business, the overall quality of that software is more important than ever before. Together with a solid market need and business plan, top quality software leads to customer satisfaction, revenue, and profitability, and the best designs can even allow an organization to more … [Read more...]
Project to Product Transformation: How to Get Started
This post is an excerpt from the Moving from Project to Product white paper by Ross Clanton, Carmen DeArdo, Mik Kersten, Alan Nance, Karen Person, and Jason Zubric. You can read the full white paper here. In our previous blog we clarified what a product-based software delivery model is. In this post we provide some recommendations on how to get started on your project to product transformation, but it should be noted that this is not something where “one size fits all.” Every … [Read more...]
What Is Product-Based Software Delivery?
This post is an excerpt from the DevOps Enterprise Forum whitepaper Moving from Project to Product by Ross Clanton, Carmen DeArdo, Mik Kersten, Alan Nance, Karen Person, and Jason Zubrick. So, you want to move from a project-based to a product-based software delivery model. How do you start? In a large enterprise, there is likely an embedded culture of working in a project model. Roles such as project managers and portfolio managers will be impacted. Business leaders who previously may … [Read more...]
Conway’s Law: Critical for Efficient Team Design in Tech
This post on Conway's Law is adapted from Chapter 2 of Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. Conway's Law Conway’s law is critical to understanding the forces at play when organizing teams amidst the long-lasting, unattended impact they can have on our software systems, as the latter have become larger and more interconnected than ever before. But you might wonder if a law from 1968 about software architecture has stood the test of time. We’ve come a long … [Read more...]
