While we all hope the stresses of 2020 will be quickly put behind us, there are also some solid encouraging signs on the horizon. Looking at Couchbase's annual IT decision makers survey results reveals both the pain and the optimism around development projects ...
Dev Culture
February 18, 2021
To kick off, the main prompt for this blog was a conversation with Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute ... Part of the discussion focused on the idea of competencies, aka how teams small and large can build out platforms of experience and expertise. The dialog wend its way through the pluses and minuses of maturity models, of centers of excellence vs project offices, of standardization vs flexibility ...
February 17, 2021
The 20% time has an almost mythical status. Popularized by Google, but with its roots actually stretching back to the 1940s, the basic concept is that 20 percent of an employee's paid time is dedicated to pursuing personal projects. The idea is that it creates a hotbed of innovation which might feed into company work and improve skills. In software development terms, the products that have their foundations in 20 percent are legendary ...
February 02, 2021
What does a high-performing engineering team really look like? It can be hard to know, but diving into the effectiveness of your delivery capabilities can tell you quite a bit. Do deploys require a lot of cross-team coordination? When production breaks, is it a long time before you can get it back up and running? Are you getting feedback and results from your changes quickly? Your team's ability to deliver is a competitive advantage, and industry benchmarks are the only way to get a clear understanding of how your DevOps practices measure up ...
December 10, 2020
Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2021. Part 2 covers the evolving role of the developer and DevOps teams ...
December 03, 2020
Continuous APIfication allows businesses to interact with customers more efficiently and more frequently, while also finding new ways to create experiences that surprise and delight. In a time where companies might be looking to transform their business with APIs, it is essential to follow a consumer-centric approach, listen to feedback, iterate and strive to always do better to delight customers. Here is how to thrive with APIs in 2020 and the future ...
November 19, 2020
DEVOPSdigest posed the following question to the development community: How should DevOps and development adapt to the new normal? In response, DevOps industry experts offered their best recommendations for how development teams can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 4 covers testing, automation, SAAS and more ...
November 18, 2020
DEVOPSdigest posed the following question to the development community: How should DevOps and development adapt to the new normal? In response, DevOps industry experts offered their best recommendations for how development teams can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 3 covers visibility and alignment ...
November 17, 2020
DEVOPSdigest posed the following question to the development community: How should DevOps and development adapt to the new normal? In response, DevOps industry experts offered their best recommendations for how development teams can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 2 covers team management and schedules ...
November 16, 2020
The "New Normal" in IT — the fact that most DevOps personnel work from home (WFH) now — is here to stay. What started out as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is now a way of life. Many experts agree that development teams will not be going back to the office any time soon, even if the public health concerns are abated. How should DevOps and development adapt to the new normal? That is the question DEVOPSdigest posed to the development community. DevOps industry experts — from analysts and consultants to community leaders and the top vendors — offer their best recommendations for how development organizations can react to this new environment ...
November 12, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a disruptive event for development teams and companies alike, unsurprisingly, according to a recent survey of developers across the world by JRebel by Perforce ...
November 03, 2020
Remote work has been a part of the developer community for years, but when COVID struck, the world went home for the long haul. Six months later? We're doing better than expected. A lot better. In fact, my team is well-positioned to continue remote work for as long as this pandemic demands. And for me? I've become a stronger leader because of it ...
October 27, 2020
Organizations are scooping up application scanning tools to implement their application security program, but they often fall short of their expectations of such a program. Because each tool produces large and different data sets, development teams are often buried under mountains of findings without a clear path towards action. This ineffective process is problematic in many ways ...
September 09, 2020
The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic has introduced a bevy of new challenges that developers have never encountered before, from company-wide shifts to remote work, budget cuts, layoffs, and salary freezes. Product development has never been more important to a company's survival, which makes the overall satisfaction of today's developer workforce critical ...
July 13, 2020
I've been spending the past couple of years looking at how to make DevOps real through best practices, supported through the use of supporting technologies running across development, through deployment and into operations. Perhaps the most important lesson I have learned so far is how many elements of development best practice have been notable by their absence ...
July 09, 2020
Keeping the motivation of your remote development team motivated is a challenge enough, let alone having to do that with the current reality of COVID-19. Here are a few ways to keep the team's spirit high ...
July 08, 2020
Companies adopting a DevOps culture will need to hire more DevOps engineers, so it is important to understand what skills employers are looking for and how to acquire the right skills to stand out from the crowd. The most crucial roles call for a range of soft and hard skills, and every DevOps engineer should focus on these in order to succeed ...
May 20, 2020
Nearly 3,700 people told GitLab about their DevOps journeys. Respondents shared that their roles are changing dramatically, no matter where they sit in the organization. The lines surrounding the traditional definitions of dev, sec, ops and test have blurred, and as we enter the second half of 2020, it is perhaps more important than ever for companies to understand how these roles are evolving ...
May 18, 2020
The unprecedented global pandemic required organizations around the world to move their workforce almost completely remote — some in a matter of days. While many startups and organizations previously had a culture where employees were enabled to work remotely, that was not the case for all organizations. As a result, many employees are adjusting to a new way of working, including one audience some may not have expected: developers ...
April 29, 2020
The third and final key takes this down to the individual level. The motivation for knowledge work must come from our hearts ...
April 28, 2020
Some research that I come back to frequently was done by Google as part of their Project Aristotle. They did multi-year research on 180 teams to answer the question "what factors are most conducive to high-performing teams?" The 5 factors they isolated were somewhat surprising, and can be summarized as ...
April 27, 2020
One of the challenges that development and IT operations teams have been experiencing for many years is the struggle to keep different environments in sync and to follow an orderly development lifecycle in a way that's efficient and painless. The DevOps revolution has been extremely influential. But late adopters that have been contemplating shifting from a world of ad hoc deployments to a world of systematic innovation delivery, might now have both the impetus and the opportunity they've been looking for ...
April 14, 2020
With very few exceptions, all software engineering teams are now operating in a fully distributed mode due to the COVID-19 crisis and our efforts to keep team members safe and avoid spreading the virus. For teams that were already fully distributed, the interruptions are likely minimal. But those that are making the rapid transition from fully- or partially-colocated to 100% distributed are experiencing significant disruptions to their operations — and their cloud security posture ...
April 13, 2020
As your development team is working remotely and being tasked with conducting "business as usual," you need simple solutions to put into place for your newly dispersed team to ensure your team can work effectively and efficiently. It is critical that each person is set-up to have a productive work space, proper communication technology and DevOps tools ...
April 07, 2020
With the surge of COVID-19, our daily lives have changed — both personally and professionally. Its impact has caused an entire shift on how we work and where we work. For now, your entire software development team has to work remotely. For many organizations, the digital transformation efforts that were implemented before the crisis have added another layer in their transition to remote work. In these circumstances, you might be wondering how to successfully manage an IT digital transformation while shifting to a remote team ...
