Episode 10: Improving Enterprise Wide Collaboration with Chris Rowett

Why Didn't You Test That?

In this follow up episode with DevOps and Digital Transformation leader Chris Rowett, Curiosity Software hosts Huw Price and Rich Jordan touch on Dora metrics. Used in isolation these benchmarks which include deployment frequency, lead time for change, recovery and change failure, can be seen to measure business performance. Another issue is that the complexity of a system can't be understood by deployment of accelerators and tooling alone. Transformational change at an organisational level needs finance, attention, and mindshare from top-down sponsorship.

Hosts Rich and Huw with guest Chris Rowett draw on their enterprise level experience. This is as developers, product owners but also quality leads. They give tips for incentivising inter and cross team communication to engender trust and garner sponsorship for organisational change. On leveraging the value of metrics, trust between teams is key to unlocking business momentum. Join the conversation to hear how this is achieved through incentivising the practitioner teams and their C level colleagues to communicate and collaborate for the goal of better software delivery.

Software development and delivery rely on various teams' trust that code is deployed correctly, so communication is paramount. Be it between internal or 3rd party teams, this leads to a joint end-to-end ownership of a problem, at which point redundancy and technical debt in a system is better understood. Also, the barriers to collaboration get lowered whilst boosting insight and understanding. As a gateway to a smarter use of resources this translates to efficiency gains where pipelines can be unblocked and duplicated tests and effort is reduced.

At the flux where teams collaborate, modelling and tooling then helps articulate communication beyond its practical application. Seen as accelerators in software delivery, it’s crucial to initially go slower to identify leaks and blockers in a system under test. With some foresight these can be implemented as part of a value stream to limit the blast radius between parts of the pipeline. This dividend pays off technical debt and improves oversight of DevOps frameworks giving insight and success that’s repeatable for other teams and practitioners to pick up towards the business goal of better product output.

The Curiosity Software Podcast featuring Huw Price and Rich Jordan! Together, they share their insight and expertise in driving software design and development in test. Learn how you can improve your journey to quality software delivery, by considering how much do you really understand about your systems, and when things inevitably go wrong, why didn’t you test that? Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | Deezer | RSS Feed