Paving the road to effective software development

One thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that autonomous cross-functional teams - ones that don’t have to stop and wait for someone outside the team to do something - can deliver business value faster. However, it isn’t possible to have every skill on every team, and we do want all those autonomous teams to build in important things like security, observability and cost efficiency.

Many of these things we care about are best owned by a separate team, distinguishing the platform from the products built on it. This isn’t a return to dev vs ops: the platform team builds and runs the platform, the dev teams build and run the services, and the interactions between them need to be as low friction as you can make them, while maintaining a level of security, quality and cost control that your company would expect.

That platform team should see themselves as enablers, providing tooling and services for common capabilities like DNS, content delivery, cloud provisioning, observability, etc.; managing relationships with vendors; and providing insights and oversight to product development teams. For this to work though, there cannot be either a free for all where teams pick whatever tech they want - and there can’t be a mandated single way to do things. The answer is the paved road, and these slides cover what this means for the organisation and the teams, with examples from my time leading this engineering enablement group at the Financial Times.

Transcript

1. sarahwells.dev Paving the road to effective software development Sarah Wells
2. sarahwells.dev Paving the road to effective software development Sarah Wells
3. sarahwells.dev
4. sarahwells.dev
5. sarahwells.dev We needed DevOps
6. sarahwells.dev DevOps DevSecOps DevSecTestOps …
7. sarahwells.dev Autonomous, cross- functional teams https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html
8. sarahwells.dev
9. sarahwells.dev DORA Core V2 (proposal), https://dora.dev/research Represents the most firmly established findings from DORA’s research
10. sarahwells.dev https://dora.dev/devops-capabilities/process/ loosely-coupled-architecture/
11. sarahwells.dev https://dora.dev/devops-capabilities/technical/ teams-empowered-to-choose-tools/
12. sarahwells.dev Autonomy is great!
13. sarahwells.dev Benefits of autonomy Can release on demand Can choose optimal tools Happier teams
14. sarahwells.dev
15. sarahwells.dev Autonomy is great! … but so is Standardisation
16. sarahwells.dev Benefits of standardisation Lower complexity Lower risk Lower cost Easier to move between teams
17. sarahwells.dev
18. sarahwells.dev Paving the road Principles Going off- road
19. sarahwells.dev Why you need to pave the road
20. sarahwells.dev 2011: Mandatory platform, manual handoffs
21. sarahwells.dev
22. sarahwells.dev
23. sarahwells.dev Introducing automation and DevOps
24. sarahwells.dev
25. sarahwells.dev
26. sarahwells.dev No room for innovation
27. sarahwells.dev Autonomous teams doing their own thing
28. sarahwells.dev
29. sarahwells.dev
30. sarahwells.dev
31. sarahwells.dev Too much autonomy, too much risk Security Cost control Operability
32. sarahwells.dev Guardrails
33. sarahwells.dev
34. sarahwells.dev What happens when another team has to take over a service?
35. sarahwells.dev If everyone works differently, moving people is hard
36. sarahwells.dev
37. sarahwells.dev Cognitive load is high
38. sarahwells.dev Team Topologies: Designing an organisation for fast flow
39. sarahwells.dev
40. sarahwells.dev Paving the road
41. sarahwells.dev
42. sarahwells.dev Not mandatory
43. sarahwells.dev
44. sarahwells.dev
45. sarahwells.dev https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-path-and-scaling- teams-with-agency/
46. sarahwells.dev Principles for building the paved road
47. sarahwells.dev Build what people need
48. sarahwells.dev Valuable Solves a problem they have Build what people need
49. sarahwells.dev
50. sarahwells.dev Own and support things long term
51. sarahwells.dev Don't make people wait
52. sarahwells.dev Discoverable: engineers can find out it already exists
53. sarahwells.dev
54. sarahwells.dev Documented: in a consistent way
55. sarahwells.dev Self-service Most of the time, people don't need any help
56. sarahwells.dev Make things easy to use
57. sarahwells.dev Allow people to extend and adapt
58. sarahwells.dev
59. sarahwells.dev Help people do the right thing
60. sarahwells.dev
61. sarahwells.dev
62. sarahwells.dev
63. sarahwells.dev
64. sarahwells.dev Build tools that are Safe: sensible defaults, small blast radius Secure and compliant Reliable
65. sarahwells.dev Principles for building the paved road • Build what people need • Own and support things long term • Don't make people wait • Make things easy to use • Allow people to extend and adapt • Help people do the right thing
66. sarahwells.dev CNCF Platforms white paper • Platform as a product • User experience • Documentation and onboarding • Self-service • Reduced cognitive load for users • Optional and composable • Secure by default https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platforms/
67. sarahwells.dev Going off road
68. sarahwells.dev Save innovation for the stuff that’s unique to you
69. sarahwells.dev “You have three innovation tokens” https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
70. sarahwells.dev
71. sarahwells.dev If the capability doesn't exist
72. sarahwells.dev If the capability doesn’t meet the team’s requirements
73. sarahwells.dev Make sure there’s a place to discuss tech changes with wide impact
74. sarahwells.dev
75. sarahwells.dev Must comply with the guardrails
76. sarahwells.dev Wrapping up
77. sarahwells.dev Paving the road helps balance autonomy and standardisation
78. sarahwells.dev https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/02/21/what-is-developer-experience-a- roundup-of-links-and-goodness/ “organisations want developers to spend more time coding and less time thinking about and working on infrastructure”
79. sarahwells.dev https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/02/21/what-is-developer-experience-a- roundup-of-links-and-goodness/ “Why would a developer put up with a poor developer experience when they can likely find a job that better aligns with their needs and preferences?”
80. sarahwells.dev https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahjwells1/ sarah@sarahwells.dev