Software Delivery Notebook

Tag: Methods

  • Multi-tasking: Executive control in task switching

    Executive Control in Task Switching
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Multi-tasking: Executive control in task switching
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    A big myth of business is that multi-taskers are the go-getters who deliver the most work. The research, though, shows that these multi-taskers deliver work slowly and have problems with quality and accuracy. In fact, the more someone rates their multi-tasking skills, the worse they perform.

    Find out how researchers tested these ideas to discover the true impact of multi-tasking and the trouble with context switching, which has a cost influenced by task difficulty and rule complexity.

    Even when people were switching between simple addition and subtraction, with cues helping them prepare, there was still a measurable cost.

  • Unraveling Software Cycle Time: Messy, Not Magic

    Cycle Time: Messy not Magic
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Unraveling Software Cycle Time: Messy, Not Magic
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    This episode looks at the preprint, No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic, from John Flournoy, Carol Lee, Maggie Wu, and Catherine Hicks from Pluralsight.

    The paper looks at how cycle time is influenced by a large number of factors, with none being a silver bullet. The compound affect of many small improvements is the way to improve cycle times. There’s also a deep look at unexplained variation and noise that makes this a hard area to study.

    There are countless tiny factors that can influence how long a single task takes… and what’s particularly striking, or maybe a bit humbling, is that this variability across individuals is even greater than the variability across organizations.

  • Work Is Water: Flow, Not Drowning

    Work Is Water: Flow, Not Drowning
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Work Is Water: Flow, Not Drowning
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    From the article Work Is Water on The New Stack.

    Modern work environments often overwhelm individuals with an endless stream of tasks, akin to a river flooding its banks. It suggests that attempting to rush work through only exacerbates the problem, leading to more interruptions and a feeling of being constantly submerged.

    Embrace a “flow” mentality inspired by natural waterways and find out how slowing down, continuous small-scale planning, and intentional decision-making is how you get things done.

  • The 2025 State of GitOps report

    State of GitOps 2025
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    The 2025 State of GitOps report
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    The State of GitOps Report is the first in-depth investigation into the adoption, practices, and benefits of GitOps, drawing on data from 660 survey responses and expert interviews. Its goal is to understand what constitutes successful GitOps implementation.

    The report finds that GitOps adoption is increasing, with 93% of organizations planning to continue or increase their use. It explores adoption not just by prevalence (breadth across systems) but also by the number of key practices implemented (depth or maturity). The report identifies a model of 6 core practices considered necessary for successful adoption.

    The data showed a clear correlation: Applying more GitOps practices across more use cases, and over more of your productions systems leads to better results. Depth and breadth matter.

  • Test-Driven Development

    Test-Driven Development
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Test-Driven Development
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    Lets look at the paper Evaluating the impact of Test-Driven Development on Software Quality Enhancement, published in I. J. Mathematical Sciences and Computing.

    Find out the hurdles and outcomes of a TDD approach. Hurdles include lack of experience, time constraints, difficulty creating comprehensive tests cases, and integration issues. Benefits are things like user satisfaction, product quality, defect reduction, and code maintainability.

    It’s not magic. TDD takes effort.

    Source: Md. Sydur Rahman, Aditya Kumar Saha, Uma Chakraborty, Humaira Tabassum Sujana, S. M. Abdullah Shafi, “Evaluating the impact of Test-Driven Development on Software Quality Enhancement”, International Journal of Mathematical Sciences and Computing(IJMSC), Vol.10, No.3, pp. 51-76, 2024. DOI: 10.5815/ijmsc.2024.03.05

  • Brooks – No Silver Bullets

    No Silver Bullets
    The Software Delivery Notebook
    Brooks – No Silver Bullets
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    The landmark paper by Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullets, is stuffed full of smart thinking that applies today just as much as it did in the 1980s.

    Find out about accidental and essential complexity and the factors in software that make it hard to share a mental model about the systems we create. Crucially, find out why the promised “silver bullets” of the 80s are not unlike those being hyped today.

    No language of technique removes the essential complexity of the software we create.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.