So, what is software quality anyways? Let’s shed some light on some schools of thought.

Three Perspectives on Quality

Conformance to specifications

Suppose we have a predefined list of requirements for a product, and all of these requirements are verified and validated throughout the process of constructing that product. When we are approaching a release, we can simply demonstrate the green check marks as the results of the verification and validation activities and be happy. We see this happening all over the place in certification-oriented businesses, but also e.g. in road construction works. It has to do with regulations and with compliance. This is the way space shuttles are built.

Read the full blog here, and find out the Three Perspectives on (Software) Quality

We are on a quest…

As consultants, we are not only challenged by the technical challenges our customers face, but also how it affects the organisational structures and the culture. Based on our experiences, EventStorming is a great technique to expose the underlying cultural aspects of an organisation, while focusing on the value streams and technology. In this post, we are sharing what we have learned, by giving examples from our experiences that hopefully inspire you to use EventStorming as a cultural assessment.

The world around us is changing quickly. Organizations need to rapidly respond to a changing world. In a knowledge intensive world, pressured by hypercompetition, new forms of organization are required to keep up. Especially around the topic of enabling value delivery, organisations need to balance the paradox of steering. Either steering via management (coordination) or empower teams to organise themselves. John Child in his book Organizations describes the concepts of integration and coordination, mechanisms to enable delivery of value.

Talking about the added value of applying Agile Architecture in your organization, we see fewer and fewer “IT architects” in organizations. Is that because we do not need Architects anymore?  

While browsing the Netlify configuration site for my account (in a more or less panicky attempt to find some config item I’d lost track of), I stumbled on an option named split testing. I know this concept as A/B testing, where you try out different versions or options of a site and check analytics to find out which version yields the highest revenue. Netlify tags this option as beta, but at the time of writing I’m pretty happy with its performance. Below is a short introduction on how to use the split testing feature.

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Remember when we used to have a production, acceptance testing, integration and development version of a site? And that we struggled to get an extra environment from IT just so our customers could test our work?

Those days are over. Below I’ll show how to set up deploys for every branch. Or every commit. And how to have all of those versions available at the same time. The enabling technology is Netlify.

This post will show how to deploy a site on Netlify, based on a GitHub repository. And the killer feature: each single commit can be deployed to a unique URL with no extra effort at all. This facilitates fast and easy feedback from our clients on the products we build.

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Great landing, wrong airport

I read this phrase a while ago and it got to me. It fitted the projects I was working on. <Enter attentional bias>.  These organisations I was working with were building great solutions (technically). Unfortunately, not always what their customers were expecting. It confirmed for me that Systems Thinking is really important. Combined with some new insights from behavioural sciences, you will land at the right airport.

Small side confession: reading this phrase triggered two things in me.  

• A memory of that time I planned a fun getaway to Mallorca with a friend but ended up at the wrong ‘Weeze airport’. Which made me think of changing this title to “Great holiday plan, wrong airport”. 
• The realisation that this phrase beautifully articulates the million-dollar question: ‘Which problem are we actually solving with this solution?’  

Although the story of the first is – in hindsight – brilliant, I’ll focus on the second one in this post.  

In a previous blog we talked about secure deployment. Secrets management is an important part of that. So what does that mean? In this blog we’ll give some pointers on how to do secrets management well in the perspective of a secure deployment. It’s easy to start saying “use tool X to store the secret” or “have all these detection tools in place!”, but that would lead to blind spots. Instead, let’s take a look at some pointers that would help you increase secret security holistically.

A desire to improve. Each organization I have met is searching for new ways to do better. A higher quality of their product. Optimize their process to deliver software quicker. A caveat however is that organizations are typically focused on technology. Learning new skills, introducing new tools. Yes, they have their benefits. They can make your product better or improve the process. However, if you are solely focusing on the technology you only reap part of the benefits. In worst case you are even actively harm the organization. 

A data-platform is nothing more than a normal (cloud) platform with some additional functionality on top to make it specific to the requirements of the data domain. Instead of the applications that run on a “normal” platform like (web)services and front-ends it runs ELTs/ETLs and data applications.