Alex has been doing software development since 1990. His current passion is how to bring soft back into software. He firmly believes that our industry has reached the level of sophistication where this lofty goal (i.e. bringing soft back into software) is fully achievable. One of the amazing ways to accomplish that is to adopt the 'fail fast' approach by crafting a measurable goal/test and then iterating until the test passes. Following that, send the sniffing police dog to check the cargo (i.e. use mutation testing), and if the dog does not detect any illicit material, your code is optimally structured. Which means it is now back to being soft, maleable, pliable. Which means you have improved the flexibility of the business operations.
Alex is presently consulting at WorkSafeBC, an organization dedicated to ethical treatment of safe work environments in support of employees and employers in the province of British Columbia. Alex is responsible for leading and ensuring prudent software engineering practices at the organizational level.
To read more of Alex's writing on technology, visit his blog: http://digitalexprt.com/blog.html
Authored Comments
Thanks for your comment. If you stay tuned, in the next article I'll delve deeper into the mutation testing, which is the final frontier when it comes to ensuring the highest possible quality of precision engineering in software.
That's a very good question. Agile DevOps depends on broken silos. If the silos are still going strong, it would be impossible to commit to value stream delivery. With silos dominating the business landscape, any attempt at streaming value is doomed to turn into a waterfall.
We break silos by not only removing any barriers between development and operation, but also by removing barriers between the engineering teams and the business/stakeholders. That's why we often speak about DevOps as having 'skin in the game'. It is expected of business stakeholders to be part of the value stream delivery. Meaning, business stakeholders are equally part of the stream of early and frequent failures. If the business stakeholders were not included in this failing early with agility, they'd never be in the position to give us feedback. As I've mentioned in this article, no one volunteers their feedback; feedback must be solicited. We solicit feedback by failing fast, failing early, and in that way provoking the business to respond with their feedback. And their feedback is what constitutes, in that moment, value.