It can be scary to devolve a lot of managerial and planning responsibility to teams but we’ve found lots of positives in changing the way we approach time management. Allowing teams the ability to plan their workloads, holidays, working location and client engagement has resulted in a greater sense of ownership on projects.
Digital service delivery
Effective Client Showcases
At Made we host regular client showcases, this is an opportunity to sit down with the client to discuss how the iteration and the project as a whole are progressing.
Planning is hard, can we do Kanban instead?
Planning is an activity that usually results in some emotional response, however it can generally be said that teams avoiding planning will also be avoiding thinking about the future in general. A lack of robust planning the detail in your organisation can bubble up to impact plans at the high level portfolio, causing serious consequences on Lead Time and Delivery Rate.
Let your teams plan for themselves
As an industry of tinkerers, optimisers and perfectionists we occasionally miss the beauty of unorganisation and human instinct. Our obsession to be more efficient and productive can sometimes have some undesired consequences. At Made we often adapt our processes in the name of efficiency but lately we’ve started experimenting by taking away some of these processes with surprising results.
Technical challenges with adopting Continuous Delivery
I spoke last time about the organisational challenges of adopting Continuous Delivery. One of the key takeaways was the importance of blurring the boundaries between team ownership in order to facilitate better adoption. This time around I want to zoom in a bit and focus specifically on the challenges faced by specific parts of the pipeline. Depending on how far through adoption you are, you likely no longer have dedicated teams for each of these functions, though the problems outlined here can still exist and derail even the most cross functional of teams.
Cohesion, coupling and viscosity
One of the most important goals of a software engineer is to craft highly cohesive code. Cohesion refers to the grouping of code in a software system.
Semantically Stable Test Suites
When we run a test suite in most languages, we can also generate reports with percentage of code coverage. These reports aren’t all they are cracked up to be.
Should I Build or Buy Software?
Often customers, or potential customers, will come to us with a pre-supposed view that they need to build a piece of software to solve their business need. We believe this is true only in a handful of cases.
Products not Projects
Traditionally, software is delivered as a project: a thing with a start and an end date, and probably a list of desired features. The software is (hopefully!) deemed complete by the end date, the project is closed, and the project team move on to their next project.
Building a Continuous Delivery Pipeline in 5 minutes
At Made, the majority of our projects use Continuous Delivery pipelines to provide a clear path for deploying to production. It’s common for these to be setup on the first day of a project kick-off.
