The landmark paper by Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullets, is stuffed full of smart thinking that applies today just as much as it did in the 1980s. Find out about accidental and essential complexity and the factors in software that make it hard to share a mental model about the systems we create. Crucially, find […]

Find out what transformational leadership looks like and how it benefits work performance and employee wellbeing and satisfaction. Based on DORA’s research program, this episode looks at one of the most impactful capabilities you can bring to your software team, which is based on 5 qualities:

This paper on Psychological Affordances and their influence on DevEx improvement interventions from Catherine M. Hicks is a goldmine for understanding how to make a lasting difference to development teams. Find out what a “psychological affordance” is, how definitions of developer experience differ, and how to create the right conditions for success. For that code […]

A tour of the 10 principles that guide safe, responsible, and effective use of AI in government from the Artificial Intelligence Playbook for the UK Government.

Looking back at the history of software delivery is like discovering the kind of diamond mine you see in cartoons. Lights reflect from perfectly cut gemstones that simply need to be plucked from the walls. Well, way back in 1968, there was a NATO software engineering conference. Surely, there’s nothing to learn about software engineering […]

Dives into the new DORA report, titled Impact of Generative AI in Software Development, which looks at the outcomes of using AI for code, docs, and other software delivery tasks. The report looks at benefits and problems at the individual and team levels, uncovering some surprises along the way like the vacuum hypothesis and the […]

This white paper from Octopus Deploy provides a comprehensive guide to mapping and improving deployment pipelines for achieving Continuous Delivery. It explains Continuous Delivery’s core principles and benefits, emphasizing its role in increasing deployment frequency and reducing risk. Establish a basic deployment pipeline with stages like commit, build, acceptance, and production while highlighting the importance of automation and monitoring. […]

Digging into the 2025 AI Copilot Code Quality report from GitClear and Alloy, which looked at 211,000,000 lines of code and made projections for 2025. Find out how AI is increasing the speed of change, and the knock on effects of optimizing for short-term speed. Or, more poetically: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave […]

Explore the findings and surprises of software deployment trends across the US by state and city, published by Octopus. Learn about the population deployment index and how California is gaining ground on Texas! Find out whether the most frequent deployers align with Bloomberg’s brain concentration index and hear some potential influences on deployment frequency. This […]

It’s time for a history lesson! We start by looking at early software delivery models by looking at MIT’s Lincoln Labs and the SAGE project. The process used for SAGE was documented by Herbert Benington in 1956. How did they tackle building the first large computer programming when none of the tools we use existed? […]