Metrics

• Deployment frequency: How often does your team deploy?

• Lead time for changes: How much time exists between a customer submitting a request and that request being fulfilled in production?

• Mean time to recovery (MTTR): How much time does it take to recover from system failure?

• Change failure rate (CFR): How often do you need to revert your changes?

“It’s much easier to make sure that the people building the software are doing the right thing than inspect nearly completed systems and features to find significant architectural problems and defects that involve a substantial rework.”

In order to reduce deployment pain, we should:

1. Build systems that are designed to be deployed easily into multiple environments, can detect and tolerate failures in their environments, and can have various components of the system updated independently.

2. Ensure that the state of production systems can be reproduced (with the exception of production data) in an automated fashion from information in version control

3. Build intelligence into the application and the platform so that the deployment process can be as simple as possible.

Five characteristics of a transformational leader are:

1. Vision

• Has a clear understanding of where we are going

• Has a clear sense of where he/she/they want our team to be in five years.

• Has a clear understanding of where the organization is going

1. Inspirational communication

• Says things that make employees proud to be a part of this organization

• Says positive things about the work unit

• Encourages people to see changing environments as situations full of opportunities

1. Intellectual Stimulation

• Challenges me to think about old problems in new ways

• Has ideas that have forced me to rethink some things that I have never questioned before

• Has challenged me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about my work

1. Supportive Leadership

• Considers my personal feelings before acting

• Behaves in a manner which is thoughtful of my personal needs

• Sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration

1. Personal recognition

• Commends me when I do a better than average job

• Acknowledges improvement in my quality of work

• Personally compliments me when I do outstanding work

Tips to improve culture and support your teams

• Building trust with your counterparts on other teams
• Encouraging practitioners to move between departments
• Actively seeking, encouraging, and reworking work that facilitates collaboration

Create a climate of learning by

• Creating a train budget and advocating for it internally
• Ensuring that your team has the resources to engage in informal learning and the space to explore ideas
• Making it safe to fail
• Creating opportunities and spaces to share information
• Encourage sharing and innovation by having demo days and forums

Make effective use of tools

• Make sure your team can choose their tools
• Make monitoring a priority