Paving the Road to Effective Software Development • Sarah Wells • YOW! 2023

This presentation was recorded at YOW! Perth 2023. #GOTOcon #YOW Sarah Wells - Independent Consultant & Author RESOURCES ABSTRACT One thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that autonomous cross-functional teams - ones that don’t have to stop and wait for someone outside the team to do something - can deliver business value faster. However, it isn’t possible to have every skill on every team, and we do want all those autonomous teams to build in important things like security, observability and cost efficiency. Many of these things we care about are best owned by a separate team, distinguishing the platform from the products built on it. This isn’t a return to dev vs ops: the platform team builds and runs the platform, the dev teams build and run the services, and the interactions between them need to be as low friction as you can make them, while maintaining a level of security, quality and cost control that your company would expect. That platform team should see themselves as enablers, providing tooling and services for common capabilities like DNS, content delivery, cloud provisioning, observability, etc.; managing relationships with vendors; and providing insights and oversight to product development teams. For this to work though, there cannot be either a free for all where teams pick whatever tech they want - and there can’t be a mandated single way to do things. The answer is the paved road, and Sarah will talk about what this means for the organisation and the teams, with examples from her time leading this engineering enablement group at the Financial Times. [...] TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 01:52 Loosely coupled architectures 02:19 Empowered teams 02:46 Autonomy 05:16 Paving the road 06:01 Our path to the paved road 06:27 Mandatory platform 09:13 Financial Times platform 13:25 Minimal platform 16:15 Guardrails 23:23 Paved road 29:56 Principles for building paved roads 30:16 Build what people need 32:55 Reduce the risk of adopting it 33:59 Don’t make people wait 37:30 Make things easy to use 38:51 Allow people to extend & adapt 40:03 Help people do the right thing 44:23 Going off road 47:24 The benefits of the paved road 47:41 log4shell 49:46 Wrapping up 51:07 Principles for building the paved road 51:49 Outro Read the full abstract here: RECOMMENDED BOOKS Sarah Wells • Enabling Microservice Success • Forsgren, Humble & Kim • Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps • Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team Topologies • Daniel H. Pink • Drive • Christian Clausen • Five Lines of Code • Andy Oram & Greg Wilson • Beautiful Code • Christian Mayer • The Art of Clean Code • Uncle Bob • Clean Code • Tom DeMarco & Tim Lister • Peopleware • David Farley • Modern Software Engineering • #Teams #DevOps #CrossFunctionalTeams #Autonomy #Accelerate #PlatformEngineering #DNS #Observability #log4shell #SarahWells Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at Sign up for updates and specials at SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily.