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Tag: DevOps

Three ways to make metrics suck less

Everybody loves to hate metrics. I get it. There are a lot of terrible metrics out there in the software development and testing world. People still propose counting commits or test cases as a measure of productivity. It’s garbage. But I also believe that measuring something can be a useful way to understand aspects of… Read more

Three notes on Value Streams

These are some scattered notes from a DevOps Toronto meetup earlier this year. These are highlights from a presentation by Steve Pereira on value stream mapping. I’ve been finding making value streams explicit, whether formal or not, a key part of my role evolving from testing to DevOps more generally. One of the basic strategic… Read more

Creating a Job DSL seed job with JCasC

I spent a good amount of time trying to figure this out today and thought it would be worth putting out in case it helps others. I’ve been exploring different ways of automating Jenkins administration lately, which has led me to trying both Jenkins Configuration as Code (JCasC) and the Job DSL plugins. I’ll write… Read more

Agile+DevOps: The Agile Acid Test and Observability

Recently I’ve been talking to various groups about “technical agility”. That is, the technical aspects of our processes and products that enable us to be “agile” in our software development. I’ve been finding it very useful to borrow terms and concepts from DevOps circles to make certain points. Perhaps unsurprising given how closely related they… Read more

Use it or (you might as well) lose it

This is a lesson highlighted by three interactions the last couple weeks. I was going to title this post “Existence is insufficient”, but I found myself taking an unexpected turn in the last section. Let’s see if it still makes sense. 1. Unit tests existing is insufficient I was talking to someone about the difficulty… Read more