A Manifesto for Better Software Delivery

An increasing number of businesses are now actually (at least partially) also software businesses. Energy companies, financial giants, insurers, and retailers – all of them have significant in-house developer populations numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands. These companies commission, buy and even build their own software. And these are not small or insignificant efforts. They are huge in many ways, interconnected through corporate IT as global IT infrastructure. It is hard to run and support all of this software using existing techniques.

Tools and techniques are often fighting against what it means to be a software developer and provide little real value to the business either. It's time to reevaluate. It's time to take a new approach to how tools and techniques are applied in the industry when it comes to software delivery.

SHOW NOTES

https://richardwbown.com/a-manifesto-for-better-software-delivery/

Global IT budget : https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-computing-security-or-more-developers-heres-where-the-tech-budget-is-being-spent-next/

QUOTES

00:44 "Building running and supporting software is hard. It's complicated for individuals and software companies alike" [RB]

00:55 "An increasing number of businesses are now actually at least partially, also software businesses" [RB]

01:33 "Everyone on the boards of these companies should be aware that building and delivering software is a difficult creative and fundamentally human process that they are undertaking." [RB]

01:48 " Existing accepted techniques of project management have evolved when dealing with more predictable, externally managed vendor-run projects. " [RB]

02:27 "The current patterns of agile lean and DevOps are definitely not new." [RB]

02:49 "We talk sprints and time boxes, like we know what they mean."

02:53 "The tools market alone is worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually" [RB]

03:32 "Crazily most of these expensive tools like JIRA, Azure DevOps, github, gitlab, et cetera duplicate or replicate each other's features." [RB]

04:05 "It's therefore insane to just buy a load of tools and think "job done"" [RB]

04:36 "let's ensure that the whole organization understands, that when it comes to building software, all bets are off" [RB]

05:09 "Get the tools out of the way. And back to being what they should be ,solutions to relieve us of the complicated manual processes and not self-justifying parts of the process themselves" [RB]