DORA Report 2024: Three Ideas to Tackle the Cons of Platform Usage

This year, the DORA report explored the topic of platform engineering. Overall, the impact of a platform is positive: Individuals were 8% more productive and teams performed 10% better when using an internal developer platform. Beyond productivity, we also see gains when a platform is used in an organization’s overall performance, with an increase of […]

Intentionally “Failing” the DORA Metrics

Many of us evaluating our DevOpsishness, have one time or another, answered how well we were doing based on the four metrics defined by the DORA research. Deployment Frequency — How often an organization successfully releases to production Lead Time for Changes —The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production Change […]

Prerequisites for Teams Without Testers

For the past three years I am working in development teams that don’t employ a professional tester. Even though there are skills I miss working without testers, still these teams manage to deliver software in good quality. Nudged by a Twitter conversation, I started thinking what were the things that needed to be in place […]

Broken Pipelines? Somebody Else’s Problem

This post first appeared at Ministry of Testing on November 16, 2020. One of the cornerstones of Continuous Delivery is to establish a reliable deployment pipeline. Each step of the pipeline aims to provide confidence and feedback on the quality of our changes in a timely manner. Removing any blockers from the pipeline should be the […]

Balancing the Quality Scale

Huib Schoots and Joost Voskuil, had the idea to bring together people with an interest in Quality and ask them questions like “How can you sell Quality?” and “What limitations or barriers do you hit?”. On January 30th, 2021 the first (of many?) Quality Acceleration Peer Conference took place and I was lucky enough to […]

Are we Done? Really Done?

A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with my manager whether we can set an initiative that we worked on to “Completed”. We had developed our part and handed it over to another team to consume the changes. But there were good chances that they would come back to us with further suggestions, […]

How does Quality fit in CALMS?

Recently, I was asked to give a 15 minute introduction on Quality Strategy in DevOps for our upcoming “Efficient DevOps with SAP” course and I happily accepted. And then, to my horror of horrors, I realised that I needed to figure out what a Quality Strategy is and what makes it unique in a DevOps […]

DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 – Notes on Compliance

Last month, I was lucky enough to attend the London edition of the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020. Like most events this year, I got to watch the presentations from the comfort of my living room even though I was planning to go to London for it. The reason this conference is particularly interesting to me […]

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 […]

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 […]