The team is the fundamental means of delivery at organizations. But organizations also need to ensure that the cognitive load on a team is not too high. A team working with software systems that require too high of a cognitive load cannot effectively own or safely evolve the software. In this post, we will identify ways in which the cognitive load on teams can be detected and limited in order to safely promote fast flow of change. First, let's look at how to measure cognitive load. Measure … [Read more...]
24 Key Capabilities to Drive Improvement in Software Delivery
This post is adapted from an excerpt of Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Our research, based on four years of the State of DevOps Report, has uncovered 24 key capabilities that drive improvements in software delivery performance in a statistically significant way. The book Accelerate details these findings. This post provides you with a handy list of these capabilities. We have classified these capabilities into five categories. Within each category, the … [Read more...]
Why: Finding the Balance for Joint Design
This post was adapted from episode 124 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. As we get to chapter 4 in our tour through Agile Conversations, it’s time to talk about joint design. In this post we focus on a common error that we didn’t cover in depth in the book: how trying to “convince” someone through advocacy fails. Using the Four Rs, we role play an ineffective advocacy-heavy conversation about tech team execution, and then revise it … [Read more...]
The Problem with Org Charts
Adapted from Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. Technology workers are in a constant state of action: creating and updating systems at an unbelievable rate, and combining different types of technology to create a compelling user experience. Mobile applications; cloud-based services; web applications; and embedded, wearable, or industrial IoT devices all need to interoperate effectively to achieve the desired business … [Read more...]
Gene Kim interviews Agile Conversations authors Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick
Gene: Are we really that bad at talking to one another, and why do you think that is? Squirrel & Jeffrey: Actually, we are really skillful at having conversations! We are proficient at concealing our real thoughts, saving face for ourselves and others, and avoiding awkward questions. Unfortunately this defensive approach undermines learning and cooperation, and so produces results quite different than what we intend. This combination of effortless behavior and the wrong outcomes is … [Read more...]
Remote-First Team Interactions
Remote-first work has suddenly become the "new normal" for many companies around the world. There is plenty of advice out there on how individual teams can bond and work effectively remotely, but there is little that addresses remote interactions between different teams that need to collaborate remotely as part of the same value stream. Moving entire enterprises online can exacerbate pre-existing interaction problems, increase wait times, and slow delivery and even response to incidents. This … [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...]
Gene Kim Q&A with the Authors of Team Topologies
Gene: Every company loves an org chart, but why are they really so misleading Matthew and Manuel: Org charts are management-focused constructs, meant to funnel lines of reporting from the bottom to the top—the typical hierarchical pyramid. The fundamental problem is extrapolating this construct and assuming it actually represents the lines of communication in the organization, alignment of business goals and decision making power. This misinterpretation still happens in most … [Read more...]
