Software quality thrives not on excelling in one area but on maintaining competence across multiple layers of delivery. Each layer acts as a filter, removing around two thirds of defects. Focusing solely on one element, like exhaustive testing, leads to diminishing returns. Collaborative approaches across testing, CI/CD, and requirements prevent issues effectively.
I'm a software engineer at heart - I love writing code, deploying functionality, and seeing the impact it has. Even when I'm just shaving a few seconds off a repetitive task by removing an unnecessary button click - it's all about small improvements, often. So it might be surprising to hear, most problems which impact … Continue reading Turning requirements into product
I'm going to put my most controversial opinion right out there and wave it around, because I am sick of internal development teams blindly trusting code reviews performed on pull requests. Don't get me wrong. I think there are some very clever UI's provided by most providers (GitHub, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, etc.) but no matter … Continue reading Code Reviews Without Pull Requests
Software delivery in many organisations is still far too waterfall, inefficient, and often unhealthy to be a part of. The myriad of methodologies which can be applied in different combinations to achieve something more efficient can be overwhelming. Normal organisational structures deny people the authority to make the efficiency savings which seem logical to them. … Continue reading Delivery Focused Software Teams
I get so frustrated when I see perfectly talented DevOps engineers building pipelines which drive big bang thinking, and calling it CI/CD. Can you all please stop? Continuous integration and continuous deployment are two very special principals which drive high quality, prevent bugs reaching production, and generally help things get delivered quicker. Automation alone does … Continue reading CI/CD
"Don't overengineer this. We need to move as fast as we can."Too many business representatives The Agile Manifesto is built on 12 pillars, the 9th of which (at the time of writing) is: Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. I regard the Agile Manifesto as a thing of truth. It has … Continue reading Technical Excellence
An essay on why software patterns become anti-patterns and how to avoid pattern rot.
https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/fitness-function-driven-development?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tech A great post from someone who really understands the problem. Worth a read!
At the time of writing this post, I am 41 years old, I've been in the business of writing software for over 20 years, and I have never ever experienced a release weekend. Until now. It's now nearly 1 pm. I've been here since 7 am. There are a dozen or so different applications which … Continue reading My First Release Weekend
I've heard a lot of people say something like "but we don't need huge scalability" when pushed for reason why their architecture is straight out of the 90's. "We're not big enough for devops" is another regular excuse. But while it's certainly true that many enterprises don't need to worry so much about high loads … Continue reading Scale or Fail
Coding Daddy Dobbs 