Anytime we want to capture the behavior of computers, we should only collect data from the systems themselves, right? Not quite. This isn’t always enough.
Neither system data alone nor survey data alone can measure the effectiveness of a modern software delivery pipeline. Both are needed and together provide a complementary view to our environment.
Continue readingLeaders can make or break an organization. Anyone can be a good leader—an individual contributor, a team lead, a director, or an executive. But what makes a truly effective leader, one that drives change in an organization, and amplifies the work of their teams?
These are called “transformational leaders,” and the research shows that they are truly remarkable. To capture transformational leadership, a model first defined by Rafferty and Griffin in 2004, can be used. It includes five dimensions.
Continue readingVery often we hear about their internal initiatives towards CI and CD. That’s “continuous integration” and “continuous delivery.” And for several years, developers and technologists have talked about the importance of continuous delivery.
Equally often, each team, in each company, is talking about very different things. Five key principles at the heart of continuous delivery are here.
Continue readingVery often we weren’t leveraging technology to deliver value to our customers. We were only using technology to do the things that we shouldn’t be doing manually. We were buying technology that our competitors could also buy. What we needed to be doing was leveraging technology to create competitive advantage. And now we know how to create this competitive advantage. Think about it. Banks are no longer valuable because they hold gold bars in safes.
Continue readingIf we ask 10 people what they mean by “culture,” we will probably get 15 different answers. Well, if we want to understand if culture actually matters, we need to have a good definition of it, because that’s what helps us measure it.
Culture does matter and it can be measured. One of the best measures of organizational culture was defined by a sociologist named Ron Westrum. He studied organizational cultures in a safety context and found that they were predictive of performance. In particular, he studied organizational cultures in high-risk, complex work environments, like hospitals and nuclear power and air traffic control.
Continue readingHow do we measure something that we can’t see? How do we evaluate the performance of something that, in some ways, almost doesn’t exist? Measuring performance in software is hard, in part because we can’t see it. Our inventory doesn’t move down a production like parts do in a manufacturing plant. It’s also difficult because software is a relatively new field.
Other disciplines, like accounting, have been around for centuries. There are two keys to measuring software performance. The first is to focus on outcomes, and not just outputs. The second is to focus on team or global measures, and not just individual or local measures. Most attempts to measure performance, often through productivity, have done the opposite. I’ll share these quickly. The first example is lines of code. This has a long history in software. However, we would prefer a 10-line solution to a thousand-line solution to a problem.
Continue readingCapabilities Models Drive Transformations
Many people in the industry are fond of maturity models. These however, focus on helping organizations arrive at a destination so they can declare themselves done. In contrast, the best, most innovative organizations know that the industry is continually evolving and has to follow a continuous improvement paradigm. To do this, they use a capability model. They’re always looking at which capabilities are their bottlenecks, and they’re improving them.
Continue readingRecently, we’ve seen countless examples of new technology having massive impact on our lives. More than ever, leaders need to strengthen their understanding of and perspective on technology. They need to survey new innovations, forecast their pace of change, and gauge the implications.
They also need to keep asking, “What if?” And adopt new tools and strategies as industry shifts, not after its shifted. Simply, leaders need to develop a healthy obsession with technology. Here’s what that means. Nurturing curiosity is the first step to understanding technological change. To know how technology might disrupt your industry, you need to know what’s in the pipeline and identify which new inventions are directly or indirectly related to your industry.
Continue readingIn controlled vocabularies a predefined set of terms describe a subject. On the opposite side there is the uncontrolled vocabulary, which means that there is no control over the vocabulary that we can use as descriptive metadata. We can use any word or any phrase that we want.
A type of uncontrolled vocabulary are “tags” like the YouTube tags. YouTube doesn’t exert any kind of control over the tags that we are allowed to use when we upload videos. YouTube says that tags are keywords to help people discover your video.
Faceted Classification
One thing we can do with controlled vocabularies is the description of a single object by using multiple controlled vocabularies at a time, which makes sense because nothing is really just one dimensional. That kind of classification is called faceted classification. The idea is to be able to describe something by using multiple characteristics or attributes.
Its facet can have its own logic. For example a car can be described by multiple characteristics, Brand, Type, Year of manufacture, Engine type, Country of Origin etc Each of those descriptions may have its own controlled vocabulary behind it. The
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