Paving the Road to Effective Software Development • Sarah Wells • YOW! 2023

This presentation was recorded at YOW! Perth 2023. #GOTOcon #YOW
yowcon.com
Sarah Wells - Independent Consultant & Author
RESOURCES
www.sarahwells.dev
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ABSTRACT
One thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that autonomous cross-functional teams - ones that don’t have to stop and wait for someone outside the team to do something - can deliver business value faster.
However, it isn’t possible to have every skill on every team, and we do want all those autonomous teams to build in important things like security, observability and cost efficiency.
Many of these things we care about are best owned by a separate team, distinguishing the platform from the products built on it.
This isn’t a return to dev vs ops: the platform team builds and runs the platform, the dev teams build and run the services, and the interactions between them need to be as low friction as you can make them, while maintaining a level of security, quality and cost control that your company would expect.
That platform team should see themselves as enablers, providing tooling and services for common capabilities like DNS, content delivery, cloud provisioning, observability, etc.; managing relationships with vendors; and providing insights and oversight to product development teams.
For this to work though, there cannot be either a free for all where teams pick whatever tech they want - and there can’t be a mandated single way to do things. The answer is the paved road, and Sarah will talk about what this means for the organisation and the teams, with examples from her time leading this engineering enablement group at the Financial Times. [...]
TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
01:52 Loosely coupled architectures
02:19 Empowered teams
02:46 Autonomy
05:16 Paving the road
06:01 Our path to the paved road
06:27 Mandatory platform
09:13 Financial Times platform
13:25 Minimal platform
16:15 Guardrails
23:23 Paved road
29:56 Principles for building paved roads
30:16 Build what people need
32:55 Reduce the risk of adopting it
33:59 Don't make people wait
37:30 Make things easy to use
38:51 Allow people to extend & adapt
40:03 Help people do the right thing
44:23 Going off road
47:24 The benefits of the paved road
47:41 log4shell
49:46 Wrapping up
51:07 Principles for building the paved road
51:49 Outro
Read the full abstract here:
yowcon.com/perth-2023/session...
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Sarah Wells • Enabling Microservice Success • amzn.to/4aa8xrv
Forsgren, Humble & Kim • Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps • amzn.to/3tCz1xO
Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • amzn.to/3sVLyLQ
Daniel H. Pink • Drive • amzn.to/45ynscO
Christian Clausen • Five Lines of Code • amzn.to/3s2zjyg
Andy Oram & Greg Wilson • Beautiful Code • amzn.to/3DYDVeM
Christian Mayer • The Art of Clean Code • amzn.to/3OwljaK
Uncle Bob • Clean Code • amzn.to/3soPO6k
Tom DeMarco & Tim Lister • Peopleware • amzn.to/3KJmFOq
David Farley • Modern Software Engineering • amzn.to/3GI468M
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#Teams #DevOps #CrossFunctionalTeams #Autonomy #Accelerate #PlatformEngineering #DNS #Observability #log4shell #SarahWells
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[@Tony-dp1rl]

Automatic DNS changes with ZERO approval of a Git PR. That is a security nightmare. Please don't do that. One hijacked developer account and it is game over for your entire organization. As simple as possible doesn't mean making stupid decisions.

[@TheLucanicLord]

24:05 Nah. They'll opt out just because they don't like being told what to do. You end up with 27 implementations that do 90% of things in common but only 5% of those do it the same way.