A few tips on successful remote value stream maps.

Reading Time: Approximately 6 minutes.

There is no doubt that the worldwide COVID-19 crisis has been a wet blanket for digital transformation across the enterprise. However, I don’t know about you, but I’m super fortunate that this is happening in 2020’s technological landscape instead of, say, 2010’s. With video conferencing solutions that work with even the slowest and least reliable internet connections and real-time collaboration tools that scale to hundreds of people per session, many of today’s key activities that required an office only five years ago can be done from the comfort of our own homes or apartments. … »

Story Points Aren't Units of Time

Reading Time: Approximately 4 minutes.

They just aren’t. WHY Search for “story points agile” on Google. Try it. You don’t even have to type it into Google; click the link! You’ll get, at this time of writing, approximately 12 million results. Accouting for the 8 million results are bots promoting something that requires your wallet, that leaves four million web pages, many of which will go on to describe story points to the letter and how they aren’t about estimation. … »

SRE and BDD: The Ultimate Power Pair

Reading Time: Approximately 7 minutes.

The responsibilities of a Reliability Engineer are well understood: maintain a high degree of service availability so that customers can have a consistently enjoyable and predictable experience. How these goals are accomplished — establishing SLOs with customers, enforcing them through monitoring SLIs and exercising the platform against failure through Game Days — is also well understood. Much of the literature that exists on SRE goes into great depths talking about these concepts, and for good reason: failing to establish a contract with the customer on availability expectations for the service that they are paying for is a great way for its engineers to spend their entire careers fire-fighting. … »

SRE Communities vs SRE Centers of Excellence

Reading Time: Approximately 7 minutes.

I read Google’s Site Reliability Engineering Workbook on a flight to New York the other day. I read their original book when it came out two years ago and was curious to see how much of it mirrored my own (brief) experience as a Google SRE. Given that it’s been a while since I did pure SRE work, I wanted to keep my skills caught up, and the Workbook seemed like a more accurate reference to follow. … »