Steve is CTO at Visible. (Read more about Steve)
Giving a talk entitled Where’s The Map Of Your Pipeline
What is the biggest improvement you’ve seen on engineering teams after they’ve implemented CI/CD?
It’s hard to choose a winner, but I love the increased velocity from automation, and the resulting shortened lead time. More than any other automation, it helps engineers ship their work more often and move on with confidence, and doing something more often always makes you better at it. Shipping more often helps so many teams get more done at higher quality, with more happiness. I think the shortened lead time is a catalyst for many positive secondary effects. After digging into a lot of software delivery lifecycle value streams, testing often comes up as the biggest bottleneck, and gaps in testing causing lots of rework. As teams implement CI/CD in their value stream, the automation makes room for them to focus on adding value, and that helps everyone.
What excites you the most about your talk?
I’m always most excited for feedback. My aim with talks is to start a conversation with the audience, and get them talking with each other as well. I try to talk about topics that I think don’t get enough attention, so it’s always so rewarding to hear from people who think the same way, just encountered the subject or have a different perspective. For me, visualization, mapping and measurement are missing from delivery team workflow, and it can lead to a lot of misalignment and micro-optimization, and there are a lot of common bottlenecks where they can make a huge difference, so very I’m excited to share what I’ve seen and heard. As far as the subject goes, I think mapping is one of those exercises that have a massive payoff relative to the investment involved. If you think of any progress: travel, work, writing etc, everything runs so much smoother when you do a little outline and measurement upfront. Without it, we’ll always spend time and effort where we wish we hadn’t. In terms of improvement, starting from a clear view of where you are makes all the difference. Not only for yourself, but for everyone else along for the ride. I’m excited to show everyone my system for doing just enough planning to make excellent decisions, align teams and improve where it’s most valuable.
What do you think will be the biggest change in CI/CD over the next 3-5 years?
I think we haven’t yet hit the inflection point for CI/CD in most companies. I still see many teams with many repeated manual activities instead of automated pipelines, lots of automation for the sake of it, and tests that don’t add value or safety. As the industry builds these foundational capabilities, the next 3-5 years will see the most successful teams treat their pipelines as products. That means better decisions on what and where to focus and automate, better user experience for teams interacting with pipelines, and higher value outcomes. I’m seeing a lot of attention now paid towards ‘value streams’, especially in larger organizations, and pipelines are a big facilitator of getting value from value streams. For that attention to pay off, pipelines have to be easy to see, use, and understand. Treating them as a product of your organization just like one for your external customers is critical.