Software Delivery Notebook

Episodes

  • Understanding transformational leadership

    Understanding transformational leadership
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Understanding transformational leadership
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    Find out what transformational leadership looks like and how it benefits work performance and employee wellbeing and satisfaction.

    Based on DORA’s research program, this episode looks at one of the most impactful capabilities you can bring to your software team, which is based on 5 qualities:

    • Vision: Having a clear concept of where the organization and the team are going and where they should be in five years.
    • Inspirational communication: Communicating in a way that inspires and motivates, particularly in uncertain or changing environments, and inspiring pride in being part of the team.
    • Intellectual stimulation: Challenging followers and the team to think about problems and basic assumptions in new ways.
    • Supportive leadership: Demonstrating care and consideration for followers’ personal needs and feelings.
    • Personal recognition: Praising and acknowledging achievement of goals and improvements in work quality, and personally complimenting outstanding work.

  • Improving developer experience

    Improving developer experience
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Improving developer experience
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    This paper on Psychological Affordances and their influence on DevEx improvement interventions from Catherine M. Hicks is a goldmine for understanding how to make a lasting difference to development teams.

    Find out what a “psychological affordance” is, how definitions of developer experience differ, and how to create the right conditions for success.

    For that code cleanup up tool to actually get used effectively, it’s not enough to just provide the tool. Leadership needs to actively signal that this work is valued, is visible, is important.

  • The AI playbook for UK Government

    UK Government AI Playbook
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    The AI playbook for UK Government
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    A tour of the 10 principles that guide safe, responsible, and effective use of AI in government from the Artificial Intelligence Playbook for the UK Government.

    1. You know what AI is and what its limitations are
    2. You use AI lawfully, ethically and responsibly
    3. You know how to use AI securely
    4. You have meaningful human control at the right stage
    5. You understand how to manage the AI life cycle
    6. You use the right tool for the job
    7. You are open and collaborative
    8. You work with commercial colleagues from the start
    9. You have the skills and expertise needed to implement and use AI
    10. You use these principles alongside your organization’s policies and have the right assurance in place

  • Looking back at NATO ’68

    Looking back at NATO '68
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Looking back at NATO ’68
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    Looking back at the history of software delivery is like discovering the kind of diamond mine you see in cartoons. Lights reflect from perfectly cut gemstones that simply need to be plucked from the walls.

    Well, way back in 1968, there was a NATO software engineering conference. Surely, there’s nothing to learn about software engineering from such an ancient conference? Well, maybe there is.

    People chasing shiny new things, struggling to measure software delivery without driving the wrong behavior, and estimation are all topics that continue to be relevant even today.

    That sounds remarkably like agile thinking doesn’t it; iterative development and adjusting based on feedback.

  • Impact of generative AI in software development

    Impact of Generative AI in Software Development
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Impact of generative AI in software development
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    Dives into the new DORA report, titled Impact of Generative AI in Software Development, which looks at the outcomes of using AI for code, docs, and other software delivery tasks.

    The report looks at benefits and problems at the individual and team levels, uncovering some surprises along the way like the vacuum hypothesis and the five key perspectives on AI.

    Here’s another one of those head-scratching moments. Despite all these positive indicators in code and in process the researching surprisingly links AI adoption to negative impacts on overall software delivery performance.

  • Mapping your deployment pipeline: A guide to Continuous Delivery

    Mapping Your Deployment Pipeline: A Guide to Continuous Delivery
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Mapping your deployment pipeline: A guide to Continuous Delivery
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    This white paper from Octopus Deploy provides a comprehensive guide to mapping and improving deployment pipelines for achieving Continuous Delivery. It explains Continuous Delivery’s core principles and benefits, emphasizing its role in increasing deployment frequency and reducing risk.

    Establish a basic deployment pipeline with stages like commit, build, acceptance, and production while highlighting the importance of automation and monitoring. Discover the cultural factors influencing DevOps’ success and find strategies for identifying and overcoming constraints to optimize the software delivery process.

    Research has shown that these external approvals actually slow down deployments, increase lead times, and don’t even improve quality or reduce failure rates. In fact, they often have the opposite effect.

  • AI code quality trends

    AI code quality trends
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    AI code quality trends
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    Digging into the 2025 AI Copilot Code Quality report from GitClear and Alloy, which looked at 211,000,000 lines of code and made projections for 2025.

    Find out how AI is increasing the speed of change, and the knock on effects of optimizing for short-term speed. Or, more poetically: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when AI agents we use for speed.”

    Good developers focus on building systems that are not just functional, but also elegant and efficient. They refactor their code, meaning they constantly look for ways to improve the structure and make it more reusable.

  • US software deployment trends 2025

    US Software Deployment Trends 2025
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    US software deployment trends 2025
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    Explore the findings and surprises of software deployment trends across the US by state and city, published by Octopus. Learn about the population deployment index and how California is gaining ground on Texas!

    Find out whether the most frequent deployers align with Bloomberg’s brain concentration index and hear some potential influences on deployment frequency.

    This population deployment index really highlights how important it is to look beyond the raw numbers and look at the context of each state’s tech ecosystem.

  • Lincoln Labs: Decades ahead of its time

    Lincoln Labs: Ahead of its time
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Lincoln Labs: Decades ahead of its time
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    It’s time for a history lesson! We start by looking at early software delivery models by looking at MIT’s Lincoln Labs and the SAGE project.

    The process used for SAGE was documented by Herbert Benington in 1956. How did they tackle building the first large computer programming when none of the tools we use existed?

    Find out why Lincoln Labs were telling us how to start with a small working system before evolving it to meet more needs decades before the Agile revolution.

    Get ready for a blast from the past, as today we’re going deep on the SAGE air defence system […] It’s like they were laying the foundation for Agile development, but like, decades before it was even a thing.

  • Developer productivity at Google

    Google Developer Productivity: Code Quality and Beyond
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Developer productivity at Google
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    A peek inside Google’s research on developer productivity, which looks at causal relationships to find what helps developers get stuff done (and what gets in the way).

    Looks at factors like shifting priorities, documentation, time spent in meetings, distributed and remote working, and technical debt.

    “Maybe it’s not just the presence or absence of documentation that matters, but the quality and purpose of that documentation.”