2024 DORA Report; Smaller, leaner teams; Why sprints are taking your joy; Optimise Department Performance
Issue #28 Bytes
🌱 Dive into Learning-Rich Sundays with groCTO ⤵️
DORA Report
The 2024 DORA Report is out. For many of you, this will be the case study to reference for your ongoing engineering delivery, continuous deployment and team wellbeing initiatives.
P.S. The ThoughtWorks Technology Radar that came out a few weeks ago also moved Continuous Deployment to the Adopt ring after 14 years!
While our crew is diligently going over the report to bring you interesting insights, here’s a practical short summary by Mirek that we thought is really interesting to get you started:
User-Centricity. Zoom out to create transparency across the entire value stream. This helps everyone reframe their work in the context of serving concrete problems for users and validate their impact.
Stable Organizational Priorities. Be clear and precise in communication. Discuss risks and unknowns rather than using priorities as a forcing function to micromanage work.
Transformational Leadership. A personal touch to caring for your team along with encouraging thinking outside the box shoos away most burnout- and satisfaction-related issues.
Data-Informed Decision Making. DORA’s key metrics dominate the software engineering intelligence dashboards for good reason: they provide key insights into continuous delivery adoption and building the software to high-performing standards.
Culture of Continuous Improvement. Slow down to become consistent and reliable at the desired level of quality and focus.
Artificial Intelligence. Everyone is using it. Jury is still out on overall productivity gains, and in some cases may lead to decrease in performance when it significantly contributes to batch size.
From our Sponsors
Implenting DORA metrics? Try Typo AI
The only software engineering intelligence platform that brings together DORA metrics, AI code reviews, & dev insights to deliver software faster, better, and more predictably.
Article of the Week ⭐
“Owning your narrative is essential to playing politics. Good narratives make goals feel natural and inevitable. They help leaders get everyone - not just those they manage - excited about achieving them.“
Dear CTO: it's not 2015 anymore
Christine Miao contrasts the current reality check in the tech landscape with zero-interest boom from just a few years ago. Her emphasis is on engineering teams that focus on maintainable and sustainable work ethics and culture.
Shift from Developer Happiness to Value Creation
The early 2010s saw companies prioritize perks and developer satisfaction, hoping it would lead to high productivity. However, perks alone don’t sustain motivation or directly contribute to the bottom line.
This created a surge in Software Engineering Intelligence tools that you no doubt noticed as it became one of the keystone conversation points at most leadership conferences alongside AI and Microservices.
Now, the emphasis is on creating value that directly impacts the organization’s success. Teams should measure productivity not just by speed or output but by their alignment with core business objectives.
They’ve been so hyper-focused on retaining their teams and staying alive that they’ve never had to justify their existence.
The Function of Engineering
Executives can’t invest in what they don’t see. Gone are the days where engineers hyper-optimise job-hopping as a career progression strategy.
Engineering Leaders are waking up to a reality of no longer having to focus merely on employee retention, but also to justify the engineering practices and cost of the most expensive and valuable profit centres in any tech organization.
Leadership with regards to software engineering comes with a growing burden and challenge of situational awareness. The complexity of a business, especially a successful one creates impediments in the cost structure of maintainability of legacy code that rarely makes it transparently up to the stakeholders who requested the software to be built in the first place.
Non-technical leaders especially have difficulties in shaping a mental model that would help them make better business decisions without consulting a wide array (and number) of engineering people.
Other highlights 👇
Why sprints are taking the joy out of building software
Sprints are not the heart of agile. Anton argues that the engineering community has the value-driven processes modelled backwards: focusing too much on planning cadence and ceremony while ignoring consistency and calm.
With the examples he mentions in his rant, that you can read fully bellow, he highlights the industry’s obsession with using sprints and sprint scope as a form of currency. Currency with which silo’d organisations try to compensate for lack of collaboration and clear strategic validation. Plus, he has some goodies to share with you that may help you grow your leadership skills.
The solution?
He highlights Basecamp’s Shape Up as a grounding, reasonable antidote to ridiculous ceremony:
Six week cycles—Focus on roadmap and moving the product forward.
Shape the work—A senior group works in parallel with all teams to design and consider alternatives within the budget
Give full responsibility—Let the team self-organize to produce vertically integrated finished increments instead of planning each individual
Target risk—Focus on the risk of delivering late and look for the rabbit holes that carry most of the uncertainty around the must-haves. Hammer out nice-to-haves
Beyond that, this methodology focuses on treating engineers like a proper R&D department: that every feature is a bet, not a backlog. Thus you need responsible teams of poker players who can think critically and clean up after themselves, not highly-efficient plugged in line workers.
Optimize Department Performance Through Team Clustering
Patricia provides a practical example on finding cultural initiatives that may benefit multiple teams at the same time using statistical analysis and surveys.
Are there groups of teams that would benefit from the same improvements?
This is the question she set out to solve in order to support her department leads both in situational awareness and decision-making to consider appropriate alternatives. Here’s how she did it:
Gather all survey data. Patricia’s case study is based on a 17-question survey looking into 7 different teams across a department.
Apply correspondence analysis to map onto 2d planes. Visualisations make everyone’s life easier. Teams that showed correlations in their answers are likely to have the same issues or respond to the same workshops, improvements.
Find teams where the same improvements will increase performance. The clusters will vary in intensity and focus. Some groups may benefit from observability, other from continuous delivery or testing. Some teams may fit into several groups. Label them appropriately.
Identify patterns across all groups. Sometimes all teams will share a common problem. When present, it may present an opportunity in addition to the clusters. This was not the case in this case study.
Document, make information actionable for other leads. And finally, present findings to Engineering Managers, Agile Coaches, Directors to agree on next steps and plan continued improvements.
Find Yourself 🌻
That’s it for Today!
Whether you’re innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
See you next week(end), Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Featured Authors -
, , , GonzalezSponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
1) Subscribe — If you aren’t already, consider becoming a groCTO subscriber.
2) Share — Spread the word amongst fellow Engineering Leaders and CTOs! Your referral empowers & builds our groCTO community.