Doing DevOps

We all want to build better software faster and more reliably. Many valuable simple improvements in code practice, design and process are easy to spot from outside the team or organisation but it is always challenging to know what the best thing to work on is day-to-day. External impetuses from consultants, managers, consultant reports or even customers are not always valuable to the delivery process. Why? Because we are told that we want to achieve a pipeline of our activities. We wish to...

When we talk about building a DevOps organisation - what do we mean? We don't do all of "this stuff" (waves hand towards a Jira or Azure Devops board) because we want to follow a particular methodology or necessarily use a set of technologies or solutions for our work. We're just trying to understand and improve how we build and deliver software better. Seeing the frameworks and ideas around us as 'solutions' to our problems is tempting. So, for example, picking Scrum or Kanban, or using npm...

As software engineers, we spend a lot of time fixing things. We code. We debug. We troubleshoot. I recently had a conversation with someone which went a little like this: me): Do you have any diagrams of this architecture? dev): No, we prefer not to make pictures because they often become quickly outdated. me): But you know the saying "picture is worth a thousand words" right? dev): Yes but we prefer to write things down. me): And those words, are they always the right words and up to...

When you need something done to a system that you work with, can you do it for yourself or do you need to ask someone to help you out? The answer to that question depends on your situation: You might not have the knowledge You might not have the access You might not have the time You might not have the inclination But what we do then determines what our colleagues need to do. If we call up somebody else or interrupt their train of thought, are we doing ourselves as an organisation a favour in...

Energy is high when we return to the office. Any accumulated stress has been taken from our shoulders, and what might have previously caused us anguish is now mere annoyance. But annoyances mount up. How do we get to the end of September, October, or November without that stress building up again? How can we move through our daily work without feeling like we are accumulating stress? In his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation", Abraham Maslow proposed that human needs build from a...

What's the biggest news from the last few weeks? ​Probably the rumbling debate about "what is open source"? This follows from the decision by Hashicorp to take their open source tools towards a Business Source License (as reported in The Register), which has implications for using these 'free' tools. If you've not heard of Hashicorp, you might have heard of Terraform, their (formally 'completely free' to use) Infrastructure as Code tool. Terraform is used by companies, both big and small, to...

It's summer season, and I hope you get to go on holiday and enjoy a few well-deserved days away in a relaxing environment. As I write this, I'm starting to wrap up my work before the summer break. I'm waiting to board a flight to Berlin for the We Are Developers World Congress '23, where I'll present my talk The QUEST for Better Software. I'm on Stage 5, this Friday morning at 10:20 am. If you are in the area, please come down and lend your support! Vacation time is often when we reflect on...

Do you have or know of a 'failing team'? How is this characterised? Is it: Too slow to deliver features Always distracted by production problems High turnover of staff – particularly domain experts or leads or anyone who has been there “too long” Unable to refactor or redesign due to continuous firefighting I've recently experienced a team that was seen to be failing and had the pleasure of being part of it to try and see what we could do to "fix it". The problems ran outside of the scope of...