Category: IT Modernization

Picture this: your roadmap is already buckling with too many priorities and the Finance Manager hits up your inbox with an ALL CAPS, flaming hot request.

In the world of Agile software development, a natural tension has emerged between the engineering and UX functions.

For many organizations, time, scope, and budget have been the standard for measuring success of software delivery projects. Teams are tasked to build what sounds like a promising idea for an agreed upon amount and by an agreed upon date. And when they do, everyone feels good, they celebrate the accomplishment, and move on to the next big thing. But what happens when those things we build don’t actually help our customers? In this article, we explore project vs product mindset and why it matters.

There are so many risks when we make changes to software systems. A defect can cause a minor frustration, cause a loss of 440 million USD in 45 minutes, and put Knight Capital Group out of business or worse.

I am old. Yes, you heard that right, I am old, well over 40. I can remember the wild west of software development when developers could do anything to a production database and deploy their own code by copying files from their computer. Developers were able to break and deploy production systems with ease.

Being successful in the digital economy relies on being able to answer “how are we doing and where can we improve?

We’ve all had that code.

Plumbing is software is any code related to wiring things together. This could be code that listens to queue messages. The code that listens for queue messages is plumbing code that is often written over and over again in applications.

More than a decade after Marc Andreesen talked about software eating the world, we continue to see digital natives — and even mature companies who have moved to a digital-first strategy — consume more and more market share at an unimaginable pace.

Coding standards can get a bad rap.

“We should log that.” Developers often throw this phrase around, using it as a catch-all for any type of error or information storage. Although logs are an invaluable tool, they aren’t the only option for recording and tracking events. In this article, let’s dive into the differences between logs, metrics, and audits and their ideal use cases.

When people hear a project or product is open source, they understand that to mean it’s publicly available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. InnerSource is open source ideology applied to an organization’s internal software development processes and projects. It’s a simple idea with the potential to transform your engineering culture. 

Without validation and testing, the software development process would be a mess. Engineers would deliver a lot more sloppy, broken code, and users would run into all sorts of bugs and issues. There’s no doubt — quality assurance is a critical part of software development. But what if we told you there’s a way to do QA differently?

You know you’re not delivering as effectively as you could.

You know your IT teams are making progress in strengthening their engineering and delivery practices, but how can you start to measure this in a more quantifiable way?