InfoQ Homepage Business/IT Alignment Content on InfoQ
-
Building a Platform to Gain an Unexpected Competitive Advantage: Ranbir Chawla at QCon London
During his QCon London presentation, Ranbir Chawla presented the journey his team took from moving from an “architectural perfect storm” and a highly manual operational system to a product company with a modern event-based architecture that can be released in < 1 hour. The company now focuses on providing real business outcomes to its stakeholders, and ensuring developers find joy in their work.
-
Making Software Development Boring to Deliver Business Value
Given there’s a limit to our cognitive abilities and our comprehension of complex systems, Corstian Boerman argues that software development should become boring. He suggests moving infrastructure out of the way so that it does not burden the day-to-day development process, and focusing on delivering business value in a predictable and repeatable way.
-
Building Cyber-Physical Systems with Agile: Learnings from QCon New York
In her QCon New York 2023 talk Success Patterns for building Cyber-Physical Systems with Agile, Robin Yeman explored how we can use agile practices at scale for large initiatives with multiple teams, building cyber-physical safety-critical systems with a scope that includes software, firmware, and hardware development.
-
Applying Machine Learning for Business Outcomes at Travelopia
Travelopia changed its focus from a technology approach to business outcomes, and adapted agile and lean for delivering machine learning solutions. This enabled them to deliver machine-learning business models faster and better.
-
Can MTTR Be an Effective Business Metric?
In a recent blog post, Sidu Ponnappa shared how MTTR should be a key business metric to measure engineering efficiency. Ponnappa notes that only tracking uptime provides no goals to target for improvements. In a recent talk at SREcon22, Courtney Nash, senior research analyst at Verica, shared that MTTR can misrepresent what is actually happening during incidents and can be an unreliable metric.
-
Jonathan Smart on Organizing for Outcomes - DOES 2022
Jonathan Smart shares patterns and anti-patterns to help organzations organize for business value and outcomes. He recommended focusing on “Better”, which is quality, “Value”, “Sooner”, which is time to learning and time to value, “Safer”, which is minimal viable compliance, and “Happier”, which is happier customers, colleagues, citizens, and climate.
-
Technical Debt is Quantifiable as Financial Debt: an Impossible Thing for Developers
Technical debt can be quantified in various ways, but you cannot precisely quantify the associated financial debt. According to Kevlin Henney, we can quantify things like how many debt items we have, the estimated time to fix each debt item, a variety of metrics associated with our code, such as cyclomatic complexity, degree of duplication, number of lines of code, but not the financial debt.
-
How to Prepare for the Unexpected: an InfluxData Outage Story Told at KubeCon EU 22
Cloud applications promise high availability and accessibility to its users, but for that to be achieved a disaster recovery plan is essential. The team behind InfluxDB shared at KubeConEU22 their lessons learned from battle testing their disaster recovery strategy on the day when they deleted the production.
-
Lightstep Adds Incident Response to Their Observability Platform
Lightstep has announced the addition of incident response management to their observability platform. The general availability of Lightstep Incident Response provides integrations with common collaboration tools, rotation scheduling, escalation policies, APIs, and a CLI.
-
Grafana Cloud Adds Incident and On-Call Management Solutions
Grafana has announced the addition of incident management and on-call support to their Grafana Cloud offering. Grafana Incident, currently in preview, generates meeting spaces, integrates with Slack, and constructs incident timelines with information pulled from Grafana dashboards. Grafana OnCall provides on-call rotation scheduling and notification from connected monitoring systems.
-
Applying Lean and Accelerate to Deliver Value: QCon Plus Q&A
Understanding the science and math behind lean principles and practices can enable engineering leaders to advocate for and implement them in their workplace. This way they can directly impact employee engagement and morale, as well as the bottom line, as David Van Couvering explained in his talk about applying lean principles and practices for delivering value at QCon Plus 2020.
-
Value vs Time: an Agile Contract Model
An agile contract model can help us to focus on the value delivered to the customer. It allows for rewarding teams and people, and can drive continuous improvement towards common goals. InfoQ interviewed Andrea Zomer, CEO at Zupit, about their experiences with an agile contract model.
-
Articulating Leadership through Nemawashi and Collaborative Boards
High performance teams don’t need to be managed, but led. Collaborative boards is where leadership and teams meet to align direction and initiatives. Nemawashi can be used to separate conversations from meetings. Fernando Guigou spoke about articulating leadership using an approach that he calls ZenSum at Agile Tour London 2020.
-
Q&A with Jeff Keyes of Plutora on the Transformative Impact of Value Stream Management
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently published their DevOps 2021 research that forecasts nearly 50% growth in VSM vendor penetration during 2020, and suggests VSM vendors are delivering against expectations. InfoQ spoke to Plutora, a leading VSM platform provider to understand what VSM adoption involves, how it can have a transformative impact and how it can fail.
-
Volkswagen’s Journey towards a Software-Driven Company
Volkswagen is changing their working methods for software development, where they focus on regaining their own development skills and developing new products based on new technologies and methods. The technologies used are decided on by the teams independently.