🔴 Loosely coupled architectures—Engineering Culture

This week's agenda & recap of last week

Please set an intention if you don’t want to miss it. Sign up on the LinkedIn event to have it easily pop into your calendar.

It will be recorded, but I suggest you join in live for the chat participation.

Agenda for the Live Stream

This week we made the agenda using your help and Adrian’s polls. Thank you so much for the input! 🤝

• Risk and stagnation caused by tight coupling

• Stop the productivity bleed-out on a web-based monolith

• Are microservices enough?

Q&A, live discussion throughout the 90 minutes. Don't be shy!

Check your time: Some countries will start rolling daylight saving changes starting next week. The event local follows Paris/Berlin/Amsterdam time.

Last week’s stream on Estimations

Commentary

Hey, this is Denis. I had plenty of fun having this stream last week. Your questions drove the conversation to the core of the problem: what to do with stakeholder-mandated flows of work that force estimations as a primary currency?

The solutions require a small cultural shift: become data-driven. Stakeholders value certainty of guaranteed outcomes more than cost or effort required. That’s why they need so much planning, management and communication. That is their only way of making decisions that has a real tangible connection with reality.

Engineering departments fail on this intent when communicating in speculative terms or even statistically irrelevant detail rather than using the data that they have. Unless your team just got formed last week, you always have data to work with.

I mentioned more about this in my accompanying article:

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Here’s what our AI overlords think of this episode:

Value Stream Optimization and Efficiency

🕊 Rushing through the development process can lead to the creation of legacy code that is hard to maintain and change, ultimately becoming a liability.

💡 Create market demand externally and internally to ensure that what you're building has market demand and to match the intensity of features to the market demand.

💡 Building features without understanding user response is wasteful and can lead to expensive decisions, as it takes more effort to create knowledge than to build the actual revenue-driving features.

🚀 In industries where releasing to production is not an option, set-based design and planning can be a valuable approach to mitigate risk and ensure the best solution is developed.

💡 Incorporating important discoveries and algorithms from a team that may not meet the deadline can enhance the overall product, even if it means reconfiguring and combining different versions.

🚀 Instead of focusing on filling the pipeline to its maximum capacity, it is more beneficial to optimize the flow of critical elements that serve the overall value stream of the business, allowing for better collaboration, problem-solving, and customer satisfaction.

🤔 The biggest problem in the industry is not the features being developed, but the wasteful processes and lack of understanding in approaching problems and building software.

🔄 A more effective way of working is to create knowledge and demand simultaneously, allowing for a continuous cycle of improvement and adaptation in software development.

Communication and Transparency

🗓 ️ Continuous communication and transparency about progress is crucial to avoid problems when tasks are not delivered on time.

⏰ "Giving yourself more room than less room is better because if you get it wrong you want to have time left to act on being wrong."

🕒 Setting clear expectations and timelines with clients early on can help ensure efficient and effective project delivery.

Agile Development and Decision-making

🔄 Agile is about focusing on what's done, using real data for decision-making, and shortening the feedback cycle to avoid speculative estimations.

⏰ Instead of solely relying on estimates, it's more valuable to focus on what can be guaranteed to be deployed in a shorter timeframe, as it provides more actionable information for planning and decision-making.

🗓 ️ Delaying estimation and working with real data during the process allows for pinpointing progress and adjusting plans accordingly, rather than wasting time guessing and estimating percentages of completion.Crafting Tech Teams is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.