What defines high-quality work in software engineering? Is it Scrum? Clean Code? TDD? Functional programming? In this Expert Talks session, my colleague Milan and I present two complementary perspectives. Milan covers the pillars of high-quality engineering work, from team building and customer centricity to clean code and engineering culture. I then show how DevOps and continuous delivery help build great products by moving from a project mindset to a product mindset.
I was invited to deliver the keynote at the Baloise OpenX Day, an internal conference where Baloise brings together their technology community. The session combined impulse presentations with interactive discussions, giving me the chance to share DevOps fundamentals and then hear directly from the teams about their real challenges. The conversations with the Baloise engineers were incredibly valuable, especially around topics like continuous deployment in regulated industries and the role of platform engineering.
In this conference talk, I discuss one of the most fundamental topics in DevOps: thinking in systems and value streams. When I work with companies on their DevOps transformations, I consistently see the same patterns. The business has bright ideas. They write them into Word documents and Jira tickets. They throw them over a wall of confusion to development. Development builds something and throws it to testing. Testing compares what was specified with what was built (never quite the same), tests something, and throws it to operations. Operations asks “How can we operate that?” and somehow, with great effort, they get it running. Then the customer sees it and says: “What is that? That is not what we ordered.”
