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Continuous Delivery, Platforms as Product and Value Stream Mapping

I talk to Jacob Lafors about his company, Verifa, as well as their approach to engagements around platform engineering, CI/CD and how he provides a value stream mapping service to clients. We talk about developer platforms and turning the developer experience into an internal product.

NOTES

The blog where inspiration for this podcast episode came from:

https://verifa.io/blog/unlock-your-continuous-delivery-potential-vsm/

Team Topologies:

https://teamtopologies.com/

DORA Metrics:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-four-keys-to-measure-your-devops-performance

Getting Naked:

CodeScene:

https://codescene.com/

https://codescene.com/blog/author/adam-tornhill

QUOTES

[07:20] “How do we build a process that  helps bring value to the company?” [JL]

[10:04] “[CI/CD setup] It’s really gonna depend on who you have in your team, your team size, the organization that you’re part of as well” [JL]

[12:18] “The social technical side of software development is really coming to the fore now. I think it’s not a moment too soon” [RB]

[13:02] (TT and Conway’s Law) “the way those technical decisions are made are so heavily influenced by the way the organizations and the teams around us are structured as well” [JL]

[13:20] “ And I think where that, that, that, that is going is, is more on the, the, the idea of platform engineering now” [JL]

[16:41] “and the reason why I don’t get so annoyed when I hear these buzzwords because I think there’s more to it than that.” [JL]

[18:09] “ if a platform team does extra work to cater for two people, it means that, or two personas, it means that those two personas have less work to do and that’s much more scalable that one central team does the upfront work.” [JL]

[18:37] “you don’t need to know Kubernetes. You can see the, the resources and you know, you can see one is green and one is red” [JL]

[21:00] On IDPs and product thinking: “getting that product mindset is, it’s not difficult if you, if you’ve been building products before” [JL]

[24:03]  “ the problem we’re solving is that we don’t want the teams to have to manage and maintain all their own Kubernetes clusters” [JL]

[24:49] “usually the bigger the company and the bigger the teams  the general level of competence that you can assume does go down a little bit.” [JL]

[26:15] VALUE STREAM MAPPING

[26:34] “If I was brought in to build some kind of internal developer platform, the first thing I would go and do is to go and run, uh, value stream mapping workshops with the, with the different software teams.” [JL]

[28:00] “So what do you do? Do you, do you create a branch? Do you start hacking, coding?  What about when you get to, to use version control? and how’s your merging process?” [JL]

[31:37] “if you’re scared of losing your, your work or your contract or whatever because of what you’re say and what you do, then, then, then you’re not, you’re not getting naked.” [JL]

[32:52] “I was kind of going through a funk at the time where I was like, continuous delivery is seen as a, again, as a hammer.” [RB]

[33:27] re: Continuous Delivery “there is no endgame and time is finite” [JL]

[34:07] “But I feel like for the justification value streams are very good because they produce this data for you.” [JL]

[34:51] “the DORA metrics are good. I wouldn’t bother creating my own metrics just for the sake of having my own metrics” [JL]

[35:39] “I would know that if, if our business is very volatile and maybe we’re quite young and you know, we need the product market fit and these sorts of things, then I would know that our key goals would be for changeability and, and adaptability and so on.” [JL]

[37:45] “You know, me and me and Bob over there, we got together and drew a value stream but didn’t really help us.” [JL]

[37:57 ] “it’s not just the diagram that’s the value, it’s the process of creating it, the process of getting people to talk, the process of, you know, that involvement with the team.” [JL]

[39:10]  “Well if your code doesn’t change, then, then why are you cleaning up all these code smells?” [JL]

[40:57] “the DORA metrics aren’t goals. I mean they don’t tell you what to do.” [JL]

Transcript
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