In my last post, we talked about common metric anti-patterns that are focused on the process instead of value. In this installment, we will cover alternatives that can help us remove waste and improve the flow of value.

Defining Terms

Goal: Something we want to achieve that will improve the performance of our organization. In most businesses, performance can be measured by profitability, sales, etc. If we have goals focused on the business, we’ll probably perform better.

Signal: Something that tells us how we are tracking against our goal. A signal is something that may not be able to be measured directly…

I was speaking at a DevOps meetup in Finland recently and was asked, “what does DevOps mean to you?” I love that they started the conversation that way. DevOps no longer means Development and Infrastructure teams cooperating and it has never truly been a job or a team. We are not solving a technical problem. We are trying to solve a business problem. How do we more effectively deliver value to our customers?

Note: If someone works for our company, they only become a customer when they buy something from our company.

DevOps is the way we work to improve…

As we try to improve the flow of value to the end-user, the first item that usually gains focus is the productivity of development teams and how to measure it. I’d like to propose that productivity is measured by customer value delivery, not team output. However, that reality is often lost as we rush to find easy numbers to get a handle on measuring teams. Misusing metrics undermines the goals of improvement efforts and playing Whack-a-Mole with metrics anti-patterns is tedious. Hopefully, the anti-patterns cheat sheet will help.

Story points:

Myth: How long it will take to complete a story

Reality: Story…

The following is fantasy. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. However, too many people live this.

ScrummerFall

Jackie is a buyer who needs better tools for forecasting demand so she can make better-informed decisions. She has a list of high value features she needs, so she contacts Dana, the product owner for the forecasting application, to request changes.

Dana discusses the features with Jackie and writes user stories for each feature with acceptance criteria for each story and adds them to the backlog. Since Q1 is half over, Dana schedules the new request to be discussed in the…

Delivering value to the end-users means we need systems that are useful, secure, and resistant to the shark-filled acid bath of the cloud environment. Engineering for chaos is crucial.

There are many resources that discuss the architectural concerns of resiliency engineering. Circuit breakers to gracefully handle the instability of our dependencies. Incrementally reducing feature abilities if dependencies are offline. Switching loads seamlessly between regions if one goes down or SLOs are exceeded. Redundant data persistence, idempotent messages, and etc. While we may be able to predict many failures and make them part of the initial design, we won’t predict for…

Code coverage is the measure of the amount of code being executed by tests. It’s an easy number to measure and a minimum value is frequently set as a goal. What is the actual value of code coverage?

True story, I was once in an organization where management told us that one of our annual goals was to ensure all applications had 90% code coverage. See, we were just starting to push testing in the area and they wanted to track our progress to make sure testing was happening. It was an interesting social experiment that I frequently see repeated…

Are you leading teams and want to make sure they are productive? There are many ways to do that. Many are doing it incorrectly.

It seems like I’m always talking about metrics. When I was first exploring how to grow continuous delivery as a team capability, I needed to find ways to find out we were doing it correctly. I mostly did it wrong at the start, but I sought out better information and then tried to verify if it was better.

Continuous delivery is not using Jenkins to automate build and deploy and hoping things don’t break. CD is…

Ah, holiday traditions. Christmas carols, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, fruit cake, egg nog, and change feeze. It’s that time of year again where companies everywhere stop allowing production changes. Let’s chat about this.