The Revolution in SDLC and Flow Engineering with Steve Pereira

A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.

Given the speed at which new insights emerge in software development, would you settle for a technology, methodology, or approach that is 60 years old? Probably not. And yet we do.

Software Development Lifecycle is with us since the 1960s, helping us manage the software development process based on our manufacturing experience. However, it is pretty clear that its linear nature, clearly separated phases, and implied team personas do not match the reality of how we do things today.

Today we work iteratively, continuously delivering and improving things, with every next step defined not only by the initial plan but also by all previous steps. We remove barriers and tear down silos so we need cross-functional teams in which people are not constrained to contribute based on their persona but are free and expected to take any role based on the situation.

Emily Freeman dared to challenge the 60-year-old SDLC with a new Revolutionary model.

This model simultaneously communicates several important points:

1) linear approach doesn’t work, embrace iterations and learn from the past

2) modern software development is not only about features, it must also address concerns such as observability, reliability, securability, testability, scalability, and flexibility.

3) “continuous-everything” means that we need to continuously switch through architecting, developing, automating, deploying, and operating activities

4) people contribute based on their current role, not their intrinsic persona

I was personally dumbfounded by the simplicity and clarity of this model. One look at this image and BAAAAM!, it all makes sense, everything that we’ve been talking about for the past decade.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to talk to Emily and share this idea with you in some of the future 0800-DEVOPS podcast episodes. Till then, be sure to watch Emily’s talk from Cloud Engineering Summit 2021.

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On “success metrics” – John Cutler shares his view on how “success metrics” sometimes stop us dead in our tracks. Looking at success metrics as the ultimate gauge of our success, we get paralyzed about how to measure things – after all, we want to be sure that we’re measuring the right thing since our career depends on it. It is better to think of them as “signals” and “indicators” of how well are we progressing toward the goal… Metrics are not the goal. The goal is something else.

Get your OKRs out of my GEMs – Kathy Keating emphasizes the importance of experiments in achieving the goals. OKRs and SMART are good at setting goals but don’t provide the structure to talk about how we will get there. Thinking in terms of GEMs (Goal – Experiments – Measures) turns experiments into 1st class citizens. Understanding what we’re doing to achieve the goal enables us to drop experiments that are not getting us closer and double down on those that are.

Wait, Do We Need to Hold Up on GitOps? – Eric Gregory is calling to caution with implementing GitOps. Although GitOps is perceived as an elegant operational model for continuously developing and delivering software in a system with a “single source of truth”, the devil is in the details, i.e. there is still no consensus on good practice for supporting multiple environments. GitOps is still a great concept, but you should take the peculiarities of your environment into account before jumping straight in.

Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies – Don’t you hate it when people use logical fallacies against you?! Learn how to recognize and deflect them!

Few books are recommended and cited as much as The DevOps Handbook. And for a good reason.

I won’t repeat here why you should read it. I’ll only give you a heads-up that the second edition is due in a couple of days. Pre-order it, I sure have 🙂