Coté's Commonplace Book
There’s not much to say at the moment, just some travel here and there before Thanksgiving and then Christmas. The end of the year is fun, it cools down and you get to see family. I’m trying to wrap up my big PDF for this year, the “second edition” of my cloud native journey book, check out a new excerpt for y'all below. There’s also some content of mine and, as always, fun links.
If you’re in the US, remember to go out and vote. It’s the least you could do for yourself.
Are you really doing Agile?
(An excerpt from the big ol’ PDF I’m working on)
Of all the topics to be understood in cloud native, the exact software development skills needed day-to-day are the most straightforward. While there are significant operational skills added to the team by taking on DevOps practices, the software development practices have been honed and studies for almost 20 years now in the form of Agile Software Development. These practices are mature and proven. As Forrester’s Jeffrey Hammond put it: “I think from a tactics perspective, Agile is increasingly a ‘solved problem.’ We know many practices that work, and that have been well proven in the field.”
While well understood agile practices, turns out, those practices aren’t widely followed. This is even 20 years later, long after agile has been proven to work! For example, one recent survey from Gartner shows how adoption of agile practices drops off quickly:
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Chart from “Town Hall: Agile in the Enterprise,” Mike West, Nathan Wilson, Thomas Murphy, Dec 2015, Gartner AADI US conference. Note that "Distributed Teams" is considered a bad practice by the study. |
While easier to do practices like unit testing are widely used, wider use of agile practices drops off incredibly fast. Test-driven development and pair programming in particular is being ignored by 58% and 70% of the survey respondents, respectively. Both of these practices have been shown to increase software quality, team resiliency, and overall improve the software development cycle.
Rather than go over each practice and how it’s neglected, I’d encourage you to benchmark yourself against these results but, more importantly, verify that your organization is actually doing them. As a start, Pivotal’s Robbie Clutton has a simplified list that focuses on the goals and results of following agile. If you’re “doing agile,” you should be:
- Reducing the cost of change for your product
- Getting continuous feedback on how your software is used
- Continuously improving your team, leading to improving your software
- Empowering the people on teams to do the above
If you’re like most people, After comparing these four goals and individual practices to how your organization is performing and operating you’ll find there’s much room for improvement. In Pivotal Labs engagements we frequently find that organizations claim to have been doing agile “forever,” but upon closer inspection follow the practices piecemeal at best. Indeed, when you look at other industry surveys, about 45% of respondents admit they’re still doing “waterfall.”
There’s a lot less agile out there than you’d think. So, it’s always good to verify what you think is going on. As the old journalist principal says: “if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.
Coté Content
Coté Show Podcast
I renamed my Lords Of Computing podcast to the Coté Show to widen the topic scope and, hopefully, get more episodes out. I still will interview people and of course do it with Matt Curry as much as possible, but I wanted to use that podcast more. Plus, I like using fireside.fm so much I wanted an excuse to do it more.
Taking a page out of John Dickerson’s book, I started doing some solo speaking into the mic episodes, each targeted on a small topic, at around 5 to 10 minutes. Yesterday, while up in Kansas City I summarized two conversations I’d had with locals at a Pivotal roadshow:
If you like these, be sure to subscribe. There’s handy-dandy buttons at the top of Cote.Show for all the popular ways, including the raw RSS feed.
(I’ve noticed that most of my listeners are in Overcast; if you are, try out that little “Recommend” button that put in the show details.)
Come see me sometime - events I'll be at
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- Nov 19th, Chicago - I’ll be up in Chicago for the day for some sales calls. If you’d like to get together, let’s figure it out!
- Nov 15th, everywhere - I’ll be speaking early in the All Day DevOps virtual conference.
- Nov 16th, Cloud Native Roadshow in Omaha - can’t make it to Kansas City? Come on over to Omaha for the same! We just did the one in Kansas City this week and it was an excellent turn-out and session list.
- Dec 6th to 8th, Gartner Application Strategies & Solutions Summit - I haven’t booked yet, but I’ll be at the conference formally known as “AADI” in December. I went last year for the first time: good stuff. This year Tony from Home Depot is speaking in our sponsored slot, which I’m looking forward to.
Links!
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