What happens when you skip the plane, the traffic and the Zoom fatigue and simply meet a colleague in a virtual office on another continent? In this conversation, I jump into VR to visit Michele at BCVR. Within a click I am standing next to him in Chicago, coffee in hand, looking over diagrams on the wall and exploring what it really means to work, train and collaborate in the Metaverse. This is not a demo of a gaming toy. It is a look at a serious business environment that, even in 2021, already feels remarkably close to the future of work.
What exactly is TDD or Test-Driven Development, and why do so many experienced engineers swear by it? In this short video I explain where TDD comes from, how the red-green-refactor cycle works, and I walk through a simple C# calculator example that shows the process in action. TDD is not only a development technique, it is a mindset that shapes how you approach every line of code.
When we are talking about traditional testing, we are talking about the V-model which is used in waterfall projects. We do requirement engineering, we write down features for our software, then we break them down and then write stories which are then given to the developer to implement this story. The developer then codifies this and then writes unite tests and integration tests.
I’ve identified 9 types of waste 🗑 in Software Development:
🧩Partially done work
💲Extra features
😤Extra processes
🤯Task switching
🧟♀️Nonstandard work
The “inventor” of the waterfall process 💧 said in 1970: “I believe in this concept, but the implementation described above is risky and invites failure.” 😱
What will move the needle in DevOps in 2021? After a year that forced almost every organisation to accelerate digital delivery, the trends I see for 2021 are less about shiny new tools and more about discipline: making DevOps stick at scale, shifting security left, getting serious about continuous delivery, leaning further into the cloud, and watching the early signals from AIOps.
Waterfall and Agile are not just two flavours of project management. They are two fundamentally different ways of dealing with uncertainty. If you understand that, the rest follows.
Waterfall: Linear and Sequential # Waterfall is a linear sequential life cycle model. The team only moves to the next phase if the previous one finished successfully. Requirements first, then design, then implementation, then testing, then deployment, then operation. Each phase has a hand-off and a sign-off. Each phase produces a document that the next phase consumes.
The third way to introduce DevOps is to create a culture of trust that supports experimentation and risk-taking. This is the Third Way in Gene Kim’s Three Ways framework — and it is what puts the team on a learning curve steep enough to outpace the competition.
The second way to introduce DevOps is to build a strong flow of feedback going in the opposite direction of the value flow — from customers and production back into the business and into development. This is the Second Way in Gene Kim’s Three Ways framework, and it is what stops the First Way from optimising in the dark.
The first way to introduce DevOps is to optimise the value flow from development, through operations, all the way to the customer. This is the First Way in Gene Kim’s Three Ways framework — and it is where every transformation should start.
Continuous Deployment is the final, most aggressive step in the CI/CD progression. CI proves the code builds and the unit tests pass. Continuous Delivery proves the artifact works in a production-like environment. Continuous Deployment removes the last manual checkpoint: if every test along the way is green, the change goes straight to production. No “deploy” button, no Friday-afternoon release window, no human in the loop for the final step.
Continuous Integration ends with a tested artifact. That sounds great, but a green build does not mean the software actually works in a realistic environment. Unit tests run in isolation. Integration tests run against mocks. Until you put the software somewhere that looks like production and exercise it under real conditions, you have not really proven anything. Continuous Delivery is the step that closes that gap.
