Improving Enterprise Wide Collaboration | Why Didn't You Test That?

00:00 - Introduction to how metrics relate to teams and behaviour.

02:49 - Evolution of modelling as a communication tool for better software delivery.

04:23 - Impact on organisations and roles.

09:28 - The time from idea to value.

12:02 - Using imagination to know the limitations and possibilities of tooling.

15:04 - What’s the perception of a problem? Team, organisation and defects.

18:56 - Challenges of top-down sponsorship.

22:20 - What’s in it for me as a practitioner and the business?

25:09 - Standards and consolidating tooling collaborative approaches.

30:07 - Test automation and open source as a first principle.

34:31 - Accountability and the impact of further right to implement standards.

37:41 - Outro to Why Didn’t You Test That? podcast.

In this follow-up episode with Chris Rowett, hosts Huw Price and Rich Jordan explore the ways performance metrics can be used to improve enterprise wide collaboration, and in turn, enhance both the speed and quality of software delivery!

Used in isolation, benchmarks, which include deployment frequency, lead time for change, recovery and change failure, are often only used to measure business performance. Additionally, the use of accelerators and measurement tools alone, doesn't help improve the understanding of complex systems. Therefore, transformational change at an organisational level needs finance, attention, and mindshare from top-down sponsorship.

Hosts Rich and Huw with guest Chris Rowett, draw on their enterprise level experience, as developers, product owners but also quality leads. They give tips for incentivising inter and cross team communication to engender trust and garner sponsorship for organisational change. On leveraging the value of metrics, and the trust between teams to unlock business momentum. This is achieved through incentivising the practitioner teams and their C level colleagues to communicate and collaborate for the goal of better software delivery.

Software development and delivery relies on various teams' trust that code is deployed correctly, so communication is paramount. Be it between internal or 3rd party teams, this leads to a joint end-to-end ownership of a problem, at which point redundancy and technical debt in a system is better understood. In turn, the barriers to collaboration get lowered whilst boosting insight and understanding. This translates to efficiency gains where pipelines can be unblocked and duplicated tests and effort is reduced.

At the flux where teams collaborate, modelling and tooling then helps articulate communication beyond its practical application. Seen as accelerators in software delivery, it’s crucial to initially go slower to identify leaks and blockers in a system under test. With some foresight, these can be implemented as part of a value stream to limit the blast radius between parts of the pipeline. This dividend pays off technical debt and improves oversight of DevOps frameworks. Which leads to better insight, and success that’s repeatable for other teams and practitioners.

The Curiosity Software Podcast featuring Huw Price and Rich Jordan! Together, they share their insight and expertise in driving software design and development in test. Learn how you can improve your journey to quality software delivery, by considering how much do you really understand about your systems, and when things inevitably go wrong, why didn’t you test that?