Tales from a Trading Desk

This video on DiffBlue Secure offers interesting insight into how using the right tool, at the right time as part of the SDLC tool chain, could reduce the defects and incident management overhead.  Hopefully this would result in a decisive “Strict prioritisation” graph.  Food for thought

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ABN Amro provides insight into its Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CICD), tooling, software quality and security via this posting.  Of interest is how they have partly improved quality via “Build Breakers”.  The issue with these breakers is that its fine for new projects who are clear on the bar, but older projects have somewhat of a hurdle to jump before they can adhere to the break.

Solution?  DiffBlue

How?  If you added DiffBlue to the CI/CD pipeline, in the event that your project drops below the % code coverage breaker, DiffBlue could create the Unit Tests, bringing you quickly back above the breaker.

Moving aged projects/products into your nice shiny CI/CD pipeline could also be aided by DiffBlue.  Generate a “full regression suite” before migrating into the CI/CD pipeline.  Problem solved.  Migration is now part of the build breaker quality solution without the need to hire personnel 🙂

Finally, Accelerate provides a view on the capabilities required to 2x team/product delivery.  DiffBlue is part of the solution for Capacity 4, Test Automation.  DORA State of DevOps also play to DiffBlue, with regards to Elite/Higher performers undertaking considerably less manual testing than Medium/Low performers.

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Just finished David Coulthard book, The Winning Formula.  Many of us have heard for year that sport has a lot to teach business.  David’s book falls into this category of learning 🙂  Here are a few examples:

• Page 66, totally commit, indispensable
• Page 102, get the best from a group of people
• Page 104, team strategy
• Page 117, “A common problem I see with high-level business people is a failure to respect everyone in their business – not just other executives or managers but right down to the receptionist worker or the cleaner”
• Page 120, never forget the important of engaging with people
• Page 122, Anti-pattern – spending too much time writing reports and analysing past failures
• Page 127, culture that respects the chain of command
• Page 153, sounds like a retrospective to me 🙂  Or maybe its an SRE post-mortem?
• Page 168, explains the sports jacket 🙂
• Page 197, quoting Bill Gates, “Success is a lousy teacher.  It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose”
• Page 215, create the right atmosphere – encourage innovation and a culture of creativity

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Many companies are looking to improve the digital brand by extending their digital footprint.  Companies offering a number of services can often be seen to have a disconnected experience between geographic locations and services.  As companies look to improve their online experience, they need to keep in mind that a consistent experience irrespective of country is important to the brand image, and that the larger the different in experiences by country, the more a users is confused due to the fact that Google and other search engines allow brand follows to consume global content, and compare services.

An example of a company attempting to provide a consistent worldwide experience is Porsche.  The general web site by country is fairly consistent from a flow and navigation perspective.  Its only when you begin to drill down into certain features, that the user experience begins to appear inconsistent e.g.  Porsche Sport Driving School (UK) vs Porsche Track Experience (global site).  Porsche Experience provides the ability to setup an account and track your progress though the various driving experiences, the UK Porsche site doesn’t provide this, and lacks the depth of information on each experience.  Net out, a disconnected experience that fails to engage the user with the Porsche brand

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Googling the web will provide a whole slew of views on measuring the value of delivery.  Numerous articles reference agile delivery, and prioritised backlogs.  Clearly the financial cost of a feature is important to the value of a feature.

Aside from the quality, cost, and velocity of delivering a feature to assess its value, you may want to consider what metric (following Amazon’s culture of metrics) will provide an indication of the value of a feature.  This maybe a simple as measuring the number of users adopting a feature, and driving the adoption as appropriate.

Metrics in clearly important in understanding value.  As is the right metrics 🙂

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