“Deliveritis Aguda y Crónica” Slides, Videos and Summary
The past October, 30th 2020, I participated in the CAS (Conference Agile Spain) with a talk called “Deliveritis Crónica” that was a continuation of the one I gave at CTO Summit 2019 called “Deliveritis Aguda”. In both talks, I give tips and tricks to accelerate delivery thinking, not only from the tech standpoint but also from a holistic perspective. Take this post as an aggregate of all the content together: recorded talks, slides, and summary.
Technology is a means to an end, not an end itself. Our goal as CTOs is to maximize the profit of the company (most likely cash, but can be other things that the company considers profit) by reducing cost or increasing revenue. Reducing cost is quite a straight forward topic. Increasing revenue comes from delivering value to our customers. Let’s not forget that. Let’s not fall into the trap of the following process, tools, and methodologies dogmatically. We need to understand the historical context, the why, and the problem that each methodology, tool, the process was/is supposed to solve and keep its spirit. Following blindless a dogma can bring us to overoptimize or sub-optimize our delivery capacity. Here are the summaries, I hope it’s useful for you.
Summary of “Deliveritis Aguda”
- Definition of Done: Don’t overcomplicate, aim for working in production with a stable system.
- Code Versioning Strategies: Trunk-based development over feature branching or even more complex approaches like gitflow.
- Gatekeepers: Everyone should be able to write code and deploy, no gatekeepers.
- Optimize User Stories: Reduce the overhead of User stories thinking on splitting by user type, volume, platform, 20/80, etc. Consider the agile principle of simplicity (maximize the amount of work not done)
- One-click deployment and rollback: That’s an easy one!
- Don’t be a bottleneck: Skills like QA or Architecture can be played by different team members, not just the ones that have such titles. This approach will avoid bottlenecks when QAing user stories, for example.
- Developing software is like basketball: Everyone attacks, everyone defends.
- Fluffy retrospectives: The main goal of the retro is what do we do as a team to become a more effective team. Be critical of the retros.
Summary of “Deliveritis Crónica”
- Toxic People: Out!
- Fluffy Agile Champions: Some agile fans more worried about methodology and dynamics than the delivery (outcome vs. output)
- Simplicity Again: Maximizing the amount of work not done
- Delivery Always Wins Politics: Powerpoint Engineering vs. delivery earlier and oftener
- Baths vs. Kitchen Metaphor: Don’t reuse things that look similar but they are not the same
- Act to be fired: Noone has been fired for being too proactive
- Scaling Agile: Agile does not scale, split the product following a Domain-Driven Design approach (Divide and conquer vs. Scaling Agile)
- Product Owner is my boss syndrome: we work together
- Lack of talent is not a valid excuse for hiring: diversification
