I had a discussion recently about “feature teams,” why they are bad for quality, and how they are yet another example of the bad ideas pushed by SAFe that create a minefield for people to navigate while trying to find the good ideas SAFe copied into their framework. According to…

The ‘DevOps is Dead, long live platform engineering” narrative has officially jumped the shark. My mother, who can barely use an iPhone, asked me about it. “Is DevOps dead?” she asked. “No”, I said, “it’s clickbait for people who don’t understand DevOps or platform engineering.” True story. What is DevOps…

Development is hard. It’s harder when there is pain in your development workflow. If it hurts, do it more. “Build quality in” is very important to me and all of my projects are configured to run my tests automatically when I commit a change to version control. If the tests…

I tweeted this recently about continuous delivery:

What’s a retrospective? According to Scrum.org, “The Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.” So, once every 2 weeks, we sit in a meeting and try to recall the things we’d like…

I was speaking to a friend recently about a production incident he was involved with. He said he noted several things that could be improved to help the team with their response. I asked if a postmortem was done. “Yes”, he said. “There was an attempt at a postmortem.” “An…

Recently someone asked me, “Does code have to be tested by code to be considered tested? Who tests the code that tests the code?” This was in the context of when to write tests. He was asserting that we only want to invest in tests after we deliver a release…

A few years ago, one of my friends took a new role and talked about the work we’d been doing on DevOps. His new CTO said, “DevOps is dead! It’s all about SRE now!” Someone is missing the point. I had dinner recently with Patrick DuBois, who coined “DevOps”, and…

Measuring humans changes behavior and often not how we’d like. Some metrics are more dangerous than others. The most dangerous metric goal I’ve found so far in software engineering is code coverage. What’s code coverage? Simply, it’s the measure of the amount of code that is executed by test code…