Software Defined Interviews

Sometimes you have to live with bad code. No one will let you change it. There’s many good and bad reasons, so make sure you’re consciously making the decision instead of accidentally doing it. I discuss some reasons people would keep bad code, how management should think through it, and then some options for coping as needed.

It was Joel, back in 2000, who said not to re-write code.

I recorded this with a Mevo, hence the kind of echo'y noise. See the video over in Facebook where I LIVESTREAMED IT!

Somewhere around just 20% of people do pair programming. It seems to be an incredibly effective technique, according to people who follow it. I go over some of those reasons and micro case studies of organizations having success with pair programming. It seems like the right thing to do.

Links:

• My Pairing column from October at The Register — The comments section is especially good for common sentiment about pair programming.
• Charles Lowell — We used to do a podcast.
• Gartner survey on pair programming adoption — I got the number wrong: it's actually around 20%, not just 10%.
• Mark Ardito goes over HCSC’s astonishing success with pair programming — They thought it'd take 12-15 weeks to get their MVP done, but it actually took 5.5 to 6 weeks we finish.
• Selecting people for pair programming and their enthusiastic response — More from Mark Ardito on HCSC's adoption of pair programming.
• Phil Horowitz talks about how exhausting pairing is at first — At Perforce: "This makes pair programming intense, especially at the beginning. At the end of the first day, I couldn't go home. Before I could face humans again, I put my phone on airplane mode, ignored my usual online accounts, and went to the gym for two hours of self-imposed isolation."

The idea of “failing fast” is popular in DevOps and agile think. That sounds like the exact opposite of what managers at large organizations would like to do. How do you get them to feel all warm and fuzzy about it? Here’s the top three tactics I’ve seen work.

Links:

• Failing fast for the uptight — One of my explanations of "failing fast": it actually means learning; here, a recording of a March 2015 talk.
• Getting Started — picking your first cloud native projects, or, Every Digital Transformation Starts with One Project — My tips on picking a series of small projects to build up internal momentum to do larger ones.
• Digital transformation: the what, the why and the how — The sad donut: "Less than 25% of organizations that participated in a recent 451 Research survey (451 Research VoCUL, April 2016) said they had a well-defined formal digital transformation strategy."

"I get to see your face during this podcast," Matt says as we start talking about SpringOne Platform. Both of us were there and we recap Matt's talk on managing 10 Pivotal Cloud Foundry instances, namely, how they figured out using a Concourse pipeline to automate much of that management. We discuss "how to do the transformation" talks we liked, like the Citi talk.

In addition to some other random digital transformation topics, we also discuss how HR policies are struggling to change with things like pair programming and DevOps.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 643

I've had a theory that the hard-line philosophy of open source has softened in recent times. Rather than thinking closed source is to be avoided at all costs, I think most developer types are a lot more willing to accept closed source bits mixed in with open source bits. That is, open core has "won." I discuss this topic with my long time pal, Barton George, while at SpringOne Platform, plus the work he's doing in the developer and OSS worlds at Dell.

We also talk about Hawaiian food.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 219.

Special Guest: Barton George.

Introducing cloud in a large enterprise can be challenging, and the technology is usually the least of your worries. Matt and I talk with Brian Gregory of Express Scripts who's been working on transforming Express Scripts to a more cloud native approach to IT and tell us some the history and some of the tactics that he and team have been working through.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

Special Guest: Brian Gregory.

Matt and I talk about lessons learned from almost a year of helping transform IT at Allstate. When it comes to scaling up agile and cloud-think the real challenges are in functions other than development, like budgeting, planning, training, hiring, and how the overall IT department is organized. We discuss those topics - esp. budgeting! - and also how to set one's personal expectations about going on the transformation journey. Then we discuss an upcoming column on mine in The Register on the benefits of small batches thinking.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 477.

Ernest Mueller has worked helped introduce DevOps in several organizations and has been talking about those stories at two companies he's worked for, National Instruments and BazaarVoice. Matt and Coté hear these stories (mostly at National Instruments) and we discuss how Ernest and others helped transform these companies to the new way.

Download directly, listen above, or subscribe to the feed: iTunes, RSS Feed.

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 655.

Special Guest: Ernest Mueller.

You don't hear too many stories about microservices in "normal" companies. In this episode, I talk with Nate Foreman about microservices-driven work he's been doing with a large enterprise recently. We discuss the goods and the bads of this approach and, overall, how it's working out. It's a good discussion of how all the usual "cloud native" concept actually play out in the real world.

(As you can guess, it's not actually an "action figure" company, we just used that example to mask the actual company.)

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

What organization could be larger than the US Federal government? Not only that, the chance to transform how software is done in the government has perhaps one of the largest possible impacts of transforming any "IT department." In this episode, Matt and Coté talk with Diego Lapiduz who works in the GSA's 18F organization helping government agencies develop their software in new, more agile and cloud-driven ways. We discuss the background of 18F and the broader government initiatives to transform how software is done and also walk through some of the learnings 18F has had in trying to make such a huge transformation.

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Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 458.