Transforming Waste into Value: How to Boost ROI with Agile Metrics
Most organisations are blissfully unaware of the sheer amount of waste lurking within their systems. It’s staggering to think about the money they’re haemorrhaging simply because they lack a focus on engineering excellence. In the context of agile and business agility, we need to embrace a continuous mindset—continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous feedback, and continuous testing. This dynamic nature of operations allows us to identify problems sooner, which means they’re smaller and easier to address. By doing so, we not only eliminate waste but also gather valuable data and telemetry that help us understand our processes better. This understanding is crucial for pinpointing problem areas and taking action before costs spiral out of control.
Transforming Chaos into Clarity: How Optimising Systems Fuels Engineering Excellence
Chaos costs money. In my experience working with various organisations, I’ve seen firsthand how they struggle to manage the chaos that often surrounds the delivery of usable, working products to their customers. The result? Substandard work, a barrage of bugs hitting production, and a frustrating cycle of rework because things simply don’t meet the minimum standards we expect. It’s a familiar tale, and one that I’ve encountered time and again.
Maximising ROI in Software Development: Unlocking Value Through Quality and Expertise
If you’re looking to build teams and an organisation that can deliver the highest possible value for your investment, then Naked Agility is here to help. Whether you’re a team member immersed in engineering practices or a CTO or CEO grappling with hypothesis-driven methodologies, we can provide the coaching and advice you need to maximise your return on investment.
Empowering Teams with Financial Insights: The Key to Maximising ROI and Fostering Ownership
If you want to maximise your return on investment for the time and effort that people put into the products you’re creating, fostering a culture where your team genuinely cares about the products and your customers is essential. When individuals feel ownership over what they create, they naturally invest more of themselves into their work. This sense of ownership is crucial; people care about things they have a stake in.
Maximising Product Value: The Power of Hypothesis-Driven Engineering
When it comes to managing product investments, I’ve shifted my perspective significantly over the years. The phrase “stay within budget” doesn’t resonate with me anymore. Instead, I view it as having a pool of money that I can allocate strategically to maximise value. This approach requires a solid understanding of the data at hand and a clear vision of what we aim to achieve.
Navigating the Unknown: How to Fund Your Product Like a Venture Capitalist
Building products is an exhilarating journey into the unknown. Every time I sit down with a team to write code, I’m reminded that we’re embarking on a venture that has never been done before. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be coding; we’d simply be purchasing a ready-made solution. This inherent uncertainty is what gives software engineering its unique character, and it’s also why we experience such a high degree of variance in our projects.
Rethinking Budgeting: How to Break Free from Traditional Constraints and Maximise Value
In the world of traditional budgeting, we often find ourselves entrenched in a cycle that feels more like a battleground than a strategic planning session. Each year, we gather around the table, armed with our spreadsheets and projections, ready to fight for our share of the budget pie. It’s a familiar scene: departments squabbling over funds, each vying for the largest slice, knowing that if they don’t spend their allocated budget, they risk losing it the following year.
Unlocking the True Power of Continuous Delivery: How Automation Transforms Software Development
If you’re venturing into the realm of continuous delivery, you might be pondering the benefits it brings to your organisation. While many tout speed as the primary advantage, I’ve come to realise that this is merely a by-product of a much deeper transformation. The true power of continuous delivery lies in the automation it necessitates within the DevOps framework.
Rethinking Software Estimation: Embrace Probabilistic Forecasting for Agile Success
One of the most significant challenges I encounter in the realm of software projects is the perennial struggle with estimation. It’s a topic that seems to generate endless debate and confusion. Many organisations feel compelled to engage in some form of estimation, whether that’s through absolute estimation—which often leads to errors—or by employing relative estimation tools. The reality, however, is that we often feel we need these estimates to chart our course forward. But do we really?
Transforming Scope Creep into Success: Embrace Agility and Deliver Value in a Changing Market
If you’re grappling with scope creep, you’re not alone. It’s a common challenge that many teams face, and often, it stems from relying on outdated practices and philosophies that were designed for a world of low variance. In environments where change is minimal, creating a detailed plan or Gantt chart seems effective. You can run the plan, manage risks, and feel in control. However, when the variance—the gap between your expectations and reality—exceeds 50%, those traditional tools start to falter, leading to the dreaded scope creep.
Building a High-Performance Delivery Engine: Unlocking Success Through Competence and Collaboration
Building a high-performance delivery engine within an organisation is no small feat. From my experience, it requires a deep understanding of various contexts and a level of competence that is often underestimated. Many organisations focus primarily on technical skills, but to truly excel in software delivery, we need to broaden our perspective.
Navigating the Unpredictability of Software Development: Embrace Agile for Success
In my experience working with various organisations, one of the most prevalent issues I encounter is the struggle with missed deadlines and budget overruns in software projects. It’s a challenge that seems to plague many, and it often feels like you’re holding onto a bag that’s slowly melting away, spilling its contents all over the street. This unpredictability is a fundamental reality of navigating complexity in software development.
Transforming Engineering Excellence: The Power of Naked Agility in Quality and Leadership
Naked agility can be a transformative partner in fostering engineering excellence and cultivating technical leadership within your organisation. Over the past few videos, I’ve delved into various aspects of this journey, and today, I want to share some insights that I believe are crucial for anyone looking to elevate their engineering practices.
Cultivating a Culture of Quality: Lessons from Boeing and Volkswagen for Engineering Excellence
Building a culture of quality within your organisation is not a solo endeavour; it requires a collective commitment from every individual involved. Each person must demonstrate their own technical excellence, leadership, and engineering capability. When individuals embody these qualities, they set a standard that others are likely to emulate. The more people in your organisation adopt this mindset, the quicker it becomes the norm.
Mastering Technical Debt: Strategies to Transform Challenges into Opportunities for Your Development Team
Technical debt is a term that often gets thrown around in the tech community, but what does it really mean? As someone who has navigated the complexities of software development for years, I can tell you that technical debt is a significant challenge for organisations. In simple terms, technical debt refers to the future costs incurred when you or your team opt for quick, short-term solutions instead of more robust, long-term approaches.
Code Reviews for Quality Assurance
Rethinking Code Reviews: From Manual Checks to Pre-Reviewed Excellence Hi, I’m Martin Hinshelwood, and today I want to discuss a topic that often sparks debate: code reviews. Traditionally, code reviews are seen as a way to improve quality and reduce defects by having multiple people review the code before it’s merged. While this has value, as we embrace shift-left practices, there’s a new perspective to consider: pre-reviewed code.
Cultivating a Culture of Engineering Excellence: The Essential Role of Technical Leadership
In my journey through the world of software development, one truth has become abundantly clear: we must cultivate a culture of engineering excellence. This isn’t just a lofty ideal; it’s a necessity for any organisation that aspires to thrive in today’s fast-paced technological landscape.
Confronting Incompetence: How to Stop Shipping Bad Code and Tackle Technical Debt Effectively
I’ve been in the trenches of software development long enough to know that we all have our moments of weakness. I’ve written bad code and shipped it. And let’s be clear: that’s not just technical debt; that’s incompetence. It’s a hard truth, but one that we must confront if we want to grow as developers and as teams.
Security by Design Building Secure Software
Shift Left: Building Quality and Security From the Start Hi, I’m Martin Hinshelwood, and today I want to explore the concept of “shifting left” in modern software engineering—a principle that’s all about building quality, security, and reliability into your software from the very start. It’s a transformative approach that not only enhances your product but also revolutionizes how your team works. Let me share some insights, personal experiences, and practical advice to help you embrace this mindset.
NKD Agility: Your partner in developing engineering excellence
Performance Engineering and Testing in Production: A Modern Approach | Martin Hinshelwood 📍 📍 Naked Agility can be your partner in creating engineering excellence and technical leadership within your organization. In the last few videos we’ve talked about a number of different ways or things that we focus on that are part of, part of that story. We talked about that, that High cost of, of, of bad quality of mediocre product, right?
Unlocking the Superpower of Software Development: How Shifting Left Transforms Quality Assurance
In my journey through the world of software engineering, I’ve come to realise that having a high-quality, usable, and working product delivered on a regular cadence is nothing short of a superpower for both teams and organisations. This principle is at the heart of delivering real value, and it’s something I’m passionate about sharing.
Building a culture of Quality
Building a culture of quality | Martin Hinshelwood 📍 📍 Building a culture of quality within your organisation is absolutely not something that you can do on your own. It’s not something that any individual can do. Each individual within the context of your organisation needs to be able to Demonstrate their own technical excellence, their technical leadership, their, their engineering capability if they demonstrate their own other people around them will see a way of behaving that.
Transforming Technical Debt: Unlocking Innovation and Value Through Quality Product Delivery
Technical debt is often viewed through a narrow lens, primarily as a cost that accumulates over time. However, I believe it’s crucial to shift our perspective and recognise it as a missed opportunity. Every moment we allow technical debt to linger, we’re essentially leaving money on the table. This isn’t just about the financial implications; it’s about the potential innovations and improvements we forgo because we haven’t addressed those underlying issues.
Technical Debt Management for Long-Term Quality
Technical Debt Management for Long-Term Quality | Martin Hinshelwood 📍 📍 Technical debt is a huge problem for, for organizations. I want to quickly define technical debt. Technical debt is
Transforming Technical Debt: Unlocking Opportunities for Innovation and Value
Technical debt is often viewed through a narrow lens, primarily as a cost that accumulates over time. However, I believe it’s crucial to shift our perspective and recognise it as a missed opportunity. Every moment we allow technical debt to linger, we’re essentially leaving money on the table. This isn’t just about the financial implications; it’s about the potential innovations and improvements we forgo because we haven’t addressed those underlying issues.
Unlocking Success: How Small Experiments Transformed Feature Delivery from 25 to 150 in Software Development
In my journey through the world of software development, I’ve witnessed a remarkable transformation in how teams approach feature delivery. A recent case study I came across highlighted a team that evolved from delivering a mere 25 features to production each year to an astonishing 150 features, all while maintaining the same headcount. This leap didn’t happen overnight; it took them four years to refine their processes and embrace a new mindset. But the results speak for themselves—who wouldn’t prefer 800 features over 25?
Code Reviews for Quality Assurance
Code reviews for quality assurance | Martin Hinshelwood 📍 📍 Are multiple schools of thought. One school of thought is that code reviews help us improve our code quality, help reduce defects because we get multiple eyes looking at the product. But I think that’s only part of the story. As we shift left, another school of thought starts to come to the forefront, which is our code should be pre reviewed.
Transform Your Software Architecture: The Game-Changing Impact of TDD and Pair Programming
When I reflect on my journey through software development, one principle stands out: test-driven development (TDD) is not merely about writing better code; it’s fundamentally about crafting superior architectures. This distinction is crucial, and I want to share my insights on how TDD and pair programming can transform our approach to software design.
The Hidden Costs of Poor Quality Code—and How to Turn It Into a Superpower
The Hidden Costs of Poor Quality Code—and How to Turn It Into a Superpower Hi, I’m Martin Hinshelwood, and today I want to dive into a topic that’s close to my heart: the true cost of poor-quality code. Over the years, I’ve seen countless organizations grapple with this issue, and the impacts aren’t just financial—they’re deeply ingrained in productivity, team morale, and even brand reputation. Let’s unpack this and talk about how improving code quality can become your organization’s superpower.
Mastering Azure DevOps Migration: Expert Insights for a Seamless Transition
Migrating to Azure DevOps can feel like a daunting task, especially when you consider that for many organisations, it’s a one-time event. This singularity often means that the necessary skills for a successful migration may not exist in-house. From my experience, it rarely makes sense to build and maintain these skills internally, particularly when the migration is something you’re likely to do just once.
