Cheat-sheet for More Laws, Principles & the Such

A couple of months ago, I wrote up a cheat-sheet for laws, principles & the such, as a quick reference to theories or adages that I often heard referenced in software development discussions. Here is the second part, for things that I needed to look up since that first post.

Keeping Up with Compliance in a DevOps World

This post first appeared at the DevTestOps community on October 4, 2019. About 5 years ago I was working in a small product that was doing (almost) everything the DevOps way. We had the works: code and tests versioned in git, trunk based development, building the code once (more or less), feature toggles, daily deployments, […]

Some Ideas for Reducing “Release Decision” Time

“Can we release this feature?” is usually a question answered by humans, not machines. From what I have seen around, even teams that practice continuous deployment seem to take a step back to consider whether they are ready to expose new functionality to their users. My impression is that “release decision” time might vary from […]

Cheat-sheet for Laws, Principles & the such

Have you ever been in a conversation where somebody ends an argument with something like “But as we all know this will never work because of Conway’s Law”? And even worse, have you found yourself thoughtfully nodding even though you are not 100% sure what Conway’s Law exactly says? I for one admit to have […]

Quality Indicators

One of the questions I get very often as a quality coach is “how can we measure quality?” If I were to reply right off the bat, my answer would be “No clue!” as I find it very hard to quantify something as abstract and ever changing as quality. Nevertheless I think the premise of […]

Have you Tried Turning it Off and On Again? – Appreciating Your Customer Support

A long time ago I was working in customer support, spending my days speaking to unhappy customers who had purchased some sort of electronic device. People generally didn’t pick up the phone to tell us how pleased they were with their purchases. Sometimes they would call to ask for a technician, others to ask how […]

The Surprising Diversity of Password Retrieval

In the last weeks of my pregnancy the “nesting” instinct kicked in. Since I was no longer working, I had the time to do important chores, such as trying out all the pens in our household to get rid of the ones that were empty. Once I was done with the physical world, I went […]