Consulting in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Moving beyond hunch and silencing the sceptics. Over the years, Conway’s Law has resurfaced as a guiding principle to organise teams. Yet, many people still hesitate to accept the idea. Ultimately, it remains a hypothesis. Melvin Conway did not provide any proof when publishing the thesis. However, in the meantime, decades later, a good deal of academic research supports the thesis. Ultimately,…
In 1968, Melvin Conway expressed a thesis on how system design follows the organisation’s communication structures. In the same period, the communities of Organisation Design and Product Design independently observed the same thesis, which later became known as the Mirroring Principle.
The deployment pipeline is a central idea in Continuous Delivery. It represents the channel through which ideas inside your business flow to the outside world so that they can be delivered to your users in the form of working software. First steps in creating a working deployment pipeline are very rewarding. They help to improve the quality of the software that you create and usually lead to…
Over fifty years ago, an observation about committees, design and resulting system designs changed the way we look at software - and by extension system - architecture forever. But Conway’s Law is not a single, static rule. Like a prism, it reveals different “shades” depending on how we look at it — through the lens of empirical research, mathematics, or social dynamics.
Lately, I encountered a specific article titled “Quality Engineering with AI”. I have seen it shared with a dangerous level of enthusiasm within organisations. To the untrained eye, the article appears to validate a so-called “modern” testing strategy; to anyone who understands software economics and the mechanics of software delivery, it is plain disconcerting - causing one to feel unsettled.
In 2023, Yves Hanoulle interviewed me for his Who is Agile series. Yves asked for an interview quite early in his journey. But I hold it off because I was in a bad place. I have nothing positive, energising to share. Eventually, I accepted. Yves was expecting a tech interview. Non of that happened. It ended up being a three hour long, comfy, very personal interview. We went on and on.
A while back, when Twitter was still a thing, someone attempted to make the case for code reviews as a better alternative to sharing knowledge over Pair Programming. The main arguments put forward were economics, poor feedback and least-common-denominator performance. Let me debunk that.
Any time an organisation tells me with great confidence that they do Continuous Delivery, I am suspicious. When I probe for clarification and start asking specific questions, my suspicion typically gets confirmed. Tooling is in place, but the mindset and understanding of the principles, foundations, patterns or the central pattern behind Continuous Delivery are lacking.
Pablo Curell Mompo invited me again for his podcast a Junior, a Senior, and I to have a conversation with my best friend Martin Van Aken on team practices.
I was once more invited by Pablo Curell Mompo in his podcast a Junior, a Senior, and I. This time to discuss metrics with Rachel Grey.