Conference: Jun 26-28, 2017
Workshops: Jun 29-30, 2017
Presentation: What Does Speed Mean in Software Product Delivery?
What You’ll Learn
- Understand the difference between feeling fast and being fast from an organizational, systemic perspective.
- Gain insight into how to take risks intelligently so they don’t impact speed.
- Learn techniques for identifying and measuring speed that you can apply in your context right away.
Abstract
There are two parts to speed in software product delivery:
- The human experience of delivery feeling slow or fast
- Delivery actually being slow or fast.
Feeling fast is about removing friction; delivering fast is about designing how you deliver. It's possible and necessary to address both of these aspects. It is soul-crushing when delivery feels slow; it is business-crushing when delivery is actually slow. This talk will explore this way of thinking about "high velocity" and specific examples of concepts and practices to try from experiences at ThoughtWorks and Spotify. For example, the friction introduced by something as simple as bad naming and the significant impact of a “divide and conquer” strategy versus “conquer and divide”.
The talk explores this way of thinking about "high velocity" and specific examples of concepts and practices to try from experiences at ThoughtWorks and Spotify. For example, the friction introduced by something as simple as bad naming and the significant impact of a “divide and conquer” strategy versus “conquer and divide”.
Change and innovation: This talk is intended to change both how attendees think about how they work and specific practices at both the detailed day-to-day and broader coordination level.
Expert-Practitioner Driven: The speaker is both involved in these types of activities as well as represents a recognized company in the Agile space (Spotify)
Originality: There is a Medium post this talk is expanding on: https://medium.com/@jchyip/what-does-speed-mean-in-software-product-delivery-9bc95c1c36c3.
Interview
Jason: My focus right now is helping the organization with the rapid rate of growth. So whatever that means in terms of how to maintain or improve in effectiveness, and that tends to be a random set of problems. Netflix calls it the paved road. We establish a paved road of sorts where you can do what you want to, but if you go off that road, you have certain things that you have to now deliver, because you're no longer on that paved road. The infrastructure, the observability, the different things that are required for a service to be called a service—you've got to do yourself now, because you're off that road. You can do it, but you have to accept the responsibility that you've got to do the additional stuff.
Jason: The idea of how to improve organizational speed is something we've been talking about for at least a year. How can we strategically maintain speed, improve speed, understand the true nature of speed, and know how fast are we. I have noticed that a distinction that many people miss, is that there's a difference between when feeling fast and actually being fast from an organizational, systemic perspective. Those two factors don't always line up. Some people are acting off a feeling, as opposed to taking a deeper look and learning what actually makes a difference in their organization. I think it's an important point for any team looking at speed to understand there's this distinction, and then learn the tactics that fall under each umbrella for your particular context.
Jason: I want to show my concept so when people come to addressing the question of how to be faster, they understand the distinctions and the specific techniques or tools available to them. I'd like people to come away from the talk and have ideas that they can directly apply to their context. I also want to convey that I think it's still important that things don't feel slow—there are methods to help change that feeling. I want to show how people can engage in these sort of efforts more effectively in general.
Jason: There will be some simple things like mundane keyboard shortcuts, and then more complicated things like backup options on risky decisions. I’ll talk about how to take risks intelligently, so even if you have to throw it away, you'll know it was still worth the shot.
Jason: From a purely technology perspective I'm generally of the school of “you learn whatever is necessary to deal with the problem you're facing”. So, all technologies and tools are things you use to solve problems. So I’d say adaptability is the strongest thing from a techniques perspective to focus on—which is also related to organizational speed.
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