DevOps

Many organisations - while branding themselves as “Agile” - continue to make the mistake of estimating project velocity based on time than effort. ...

Deployment / Delivery Frequency I often end up needing to advocate for more frequent delivery/deployments with clients. There’s the usual benefits commonly discussed such as improved feedback, reduced risk, well understood processes, maintainable dependencies etc… however what’s often missed entirely is how it relates to the health and sustainability of the team. ...

We’re (still) not deploying enough It’s 2022 and not deploying frequently enough is still one of the most common causes of software failure. ...

A template team charter for software and platform engineering teams. Research1 shows there is great value in people embracing a shared vision and ideas that are bigger than themselves. When it comes to a team charter, it’s important to remember that it’s not a static document. It’s a living document that should be updated as the team evolves and grows. Keep in mind that One size doesn’t fit all. Consider your (teams) mission, cultural background and values. While not exhaustive - this is on the longer side, you may wish to distill as is practical, but I implore you not to only pick the easier items - that’s missing the point. These can give you talking points when performing postmortems, retros and during times of conflict. See also: ‘Using Old Ways of Thinking to Apply New Ways of Working’ and ‘BVSSHJ Principles’. ...

Stop trying to hire with titles like ‘DevOps Engineer’ or ‘Cloud Engineer’ “DevOps is … not a job title” “It’s more of a cultural practice, like innovation, and it makes just as little sense hiring “innovation engineers” and expecting your organisation to be innovative, without also creating the culture to foster innovation.” (Joel Shea when responding to this posted on LinkedIn) In most cases it’s clear the organisation doesn’t truly know what they want or need and likely don’t understand the nuances of the aspects of engineering. ...

The way we work at Infoxchange has changed greatly. A retrospective journey into transforming Infoxchange’s technology and culture over the past 24 months - presented a Melbourne DevOps - December 2014