What standards apply to get the best out of your software engineering and operations?
You might be “doing Agile”, but what does that mean? Are you delivering more customer value faster? You might be building MVPs, but are you putting them in front of customers? Are you actually doing DevOps or do you still have a Change Advisory Board? Is your CI effective, and is it quick?
So many aspects to your engineering effort are subtle and difficult to get right. Many agile or digital transformations miss the point – they attempt to change process without helping anyone actually build software faster and at higher quality.
By getting back to the basics of engineering practice and focusing on core concepts you can once again start to move the needle on what is important. For example, it may be that you need to prioritise the following:
- Implementing DORA metrics to know how effective you are now.
- Implement effective CI and focus on lead time
- Make quality everyone’s concern (examine unit test coverage but also encourage refactoring and TDD)
- Remove redundant processes and ‘ceremonies’
- Reduce the gap between what your customer experiences and how you responded to their changing needs
- Build a product roadmap which is more than just a wishlist
Becoming excellent at software engineering is not just down to changing one thing. However, as with software development itself, breaking down the change process down into measurable, achievable, steps will enable you to achieve improvement.