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...]
The 3 Real Risks Every Project Manager Should Focus On
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. It turns out that people are pretty terrible at assessing probabilities and risk. In my last book, A Seat at the Table, I cited several examples to make this point—examples that I love because even knowing the right answer I still can’t convince myself it is right. The first example had to do with the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal, in which the contestant is asked … [Read more...]
Quick Guide to DevOps for the Non-IT Business Leader
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. What is DevOps 1) Small Teams of T-Shaped People DevOps is practiced in small teams, say five to nine people. Small teams can communicate among themselves face-to-face, thereby avoiding the overhead of passing around and perfecting documents. Each team is cross-functional, with skills in software development, testing, infrastructure engineering, operations, and … [Read more...]
Shaping Your Multispeed Future: Two Key Exercises from Mirco Hering
Adapted from DevOps for the Modern Enterprise by Mirco Hering To support you in adopting a multispeed future, here are two exercises for you to run in your organization. Both of them are highly related: the first is an analysis of your application portfolio and the second is the identification of a minimum viable cluster of application for which a capability uplift will provide real value. Application Portfolio Analysis If you are like most of my clients, you will have hundreds or thousands … [Read more...]
The Three Epiphanies of Mik Kersten
Adapted from Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten. My career has been dedicated to understanding and improving how large-scale software is built. I spent nearly two decades working on new programming languages and software development tools, and have had a chance to work with some of the best technologists in the world. But I have come to realize that, due to where we are in the Turning Point, technology … [Read more...]
Balanced Flowchart Exercise
By Dominica Degrandis The balanced flowchart exercise is a companion to Chapter 3.1 of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow. This exercise includes four useful metrics—all on one sheet—to help people see metric trends over time and understand how to become more predictable. TIME: 45–60 minutes PURPOSE: To discover what lead time, throughput, change failure rate (CFR), and probabilistic percentiles are by performing themby hand, and to learn what each can … [Read more...]
Why the Full Stack Engineer Is Problematic
Excerpt from the DevOps Enterprise Forum Paper Full Stack Teams, Not Engineers, by Jason Cox, Christian Posta, Cornelia Davis, Dominica Degrandis, Jim Stoneham, and Thomas A. Limoncelli. Can you possibly be good at everything? In the digital era, the sheer quantity of tools, frameworks, programming languages, and methods/models overwhelms the brain. Technologies come and go, and learning a new technology often involves intense effort. Learning a new environment and domain knowledge … [Read more...]
Guest Post: Project to Product, Software, and Safety: Getting in the Same Plane
Guest Post by Mik Kersten, author of Project to Product Project to Product tells a story of what we can learn about building software by walking down the BMW Group Leipzig plant production line. The other wonder of mass production that makes repeated appearances throughout the book is the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which has long been an inspiration to me and whose silhouette graces the cover of Project to Product. Not only is it a marvel of engineering and beauty, it is a marvel of supply chain … [Read more...]
Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework
IT Revolution is excited to announce the release of our latest book, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, has written a book that every business, big or small, will need to read if they want to survive the Age of Software. Tech giants, startups, and digital natives are disrupting every market. No one is immune. And just as happened in the Age of Manufacturing, any business that doesn’t rise to … [Read more...]
Q&A With Dominica DeGrandis and Gene Kim
Recently, Gene Kim and Dominica DeGrandis had a chance to discuss Dominica's new book, Making Work Visible. Gene Kim: What inspired you to write this book? Dominica DeGrandis: When I was a Kanban for DevOps flow consultant, I facilitated a lot of workshops to help organizations design and improve their workflow. Workshop attendees repeatedly requested a handout that they could reference during the workshops. They wanted to look at the example kanban boards and policies while doing the … [Read more...]
