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• Relying on different types of testing, such as property-based testing and contract testing, to reduce reliance on integration tests |
• Avoiding over-organization of tests into a single bucket, instead organizing by constraints and using multiple test suites |
• Maximizing isolated units that can be tested in isolation for fast feedback, while also having locally integrated tests and some number of contract tests |
• Olympic event in Tokyo |
• Japanese news and media coverage |
• 13-year-old female gold medal winner in skateboarding |
• Excitement generated by the achievement |
• Show notes with additional content |
• Future episode planning |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So in my career, I have been part of many teams that just sling code, or features, our business value, depending on who you talk to. But sometimes that did not feel right, just slinging code, slinging stuff. Yes, you should ship and learn quickly, very important... Constantly challenge your assumption... |
**Justin Searls:** Yeah and that's the sort of -- I've been on both sides of this conversation; as an entry-level developer, feeling like I had just an infinite amount of pressure, both from on high, wanting more things shipped faster than was physically possible, pushing constantly to just get features out the door, o... |
\[04:06\] And I'm at a point now of relative competence, but it's taken me 20 years to realize the software that I want to build, as I build. But until I got to that point, I needed the safety of being able -- psychological safety, as well as the vulnerability in like a social term to be able to communicate with people... |
And so, in the beginning of my career, I viewed your question of just slinging code versus getting stuff right, almost entirely through the lens of these social pressures that others placed on me, that I imagined others placing on me, and that I placed on myself, and it was very difficult for me to escape that. |
Later in my career, as I started to move into either non-technical roles, or helping teams in a way that was purely advisory, you'd see teams that even in the absence of pressure, they would still really struggle to get any kind of traction towards delivering anything. |
And I would talk to very well-intended VPs of engineering or CTOs about "How do I, without downstream pressuring people, and giving them deadlines and cracking the whip, so to speak, get the outcomes that I want?" And the answer, then and now, seems to be that the autonomy needs to be met with some sort of healthy alig... |
I think there's a reason why we keep talking about words like velocity, speed, "How fast can we go?" And I think to somebody who's new, they might think that that's all about how fast you can type, right? Or how fast you get features out the door. But really, I started to think about it in terms of not speed per se, bu... |
And if we're going to optimize for one thing, it's probably smoothness over speed, per se. And it's difficult, because it sounds like a little bit like woo, I think, to both developers who just want to focus on the technology, and to managers who just want their project done yesterday. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. |
**Justin Searls:** So I don't know... Long-winded way to maybe not answer your question. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** No, I think that was a very good one, because it just showed how much complexity there is, in that answer. And this is complexity that comes from experience, that comes from the real world, all the situations that you have been in personally, and I know that many can relate to you. |
What I can relate to the most is that velocity. It really doesn't matter how many points you deliver in a sprint; it's not about that, it's about how can you keep that consistent, not over a few weeks or a few months, but about across years. In a couple of years, how can you consistently maintain a speed that's healthy... |
\[08:16\] I think to this, there's another thing which keeps coming very often - going in the wrong direction, regardless of the speed, will always be wrong. So what would you say about that, about knowing where to point teams, especially the ones that have to collaborate? |
**Justin Searls:** Yes, that's a great question. And I think that a guiding light for me on the most successful teams that I have either been a part of or that I have witnessed, has always been a shared and common just understanding of what their purpose was. So I was part of an organization, a consulting company, just... |
And so if user stories rolled up into like Epics -- Epics, in their sales parlance and also in how they practiced and delivered, would roll up into business value stories, or value stories. And we would start each engagement by actually getting the whole team in a room - developers, QA, product owners, business stakeho... |
And first of all, a lot of executives, it turns out, are uncomfortable with being put on the spot to answer what shouldn't be a simple question such as that... But when you really sat with it, and as a team forced the conversation out, and then you followed through, not just on -- I don't know... Here's a project examp... |
And even though, in my practice at Test Double, our clients - they work on fantastic and wonderful products - I think that we have sort of been encouched into this default relationship where product throws "Here's the features that we want" and "Here's the things that we need." There's a disconnect at the developer lev... |
\[12:11\] And I have seen teams where developers know the answer to "Why", and when a product owner says, "Hey, here's how these comps should go... And you click this and then you click this, and then you click this", a developer who knows what the ultimate goal is, in terms of like business value or whatever the overa... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This resonates with me at many different levels. I've seen a lot of what you've just said in Pivotal Labs. I've seen this in the IBM Bluemix Garage. These are the things that, you're right, were the most important ones from the beginning. I like the engagements, that engagement mentality, I like the f... |
However, I've also seen a different side of the coin, where you're working on a software that gets shipped and others get to use, to implement their own things, like for example a database or a proxy, or whatever else, but it's like more technology-oriented. What do you think the equivalent why and the equivalent busin... |
**Justin Searls:** If you're building a developer-focused tool - and this could be a paid database, like a Snowflake, or something like that, or an API... Or it could be open source and it could be completely free - I think it's still important to understand that when developers are your customer, they are still human,... |
In general, I suppose -- to clarify your question, are you asking specifically about how this applies when the overall objective is less about making money and more about meeting somebody's unmet need with technology? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Well, I think with the software that we write, everybody's trying to make money. But I think sometimes the relationship between making money and writing the software is clearer... Such as, for example, when you write like for business-facing, customer-facing products. But if you have a software that y... |
So let's take, for example, MySQL. Let's say that you're selling MySQL and you're building MySQL. I mean, sure you have the licenses that MySQL has, or maybe you have a service that you offer, which MySQL is part of, but then the value is less clear, because you're not building the software to, as I said, sell licenses... |
**Justin Searls:** I think that what you're describing could be phrased as like a different vector, where some products are just obvious. Like, if I was hired as the Chief Product Officer of a company that made branded sweatpants, and you could put like any college name on those sweatpants that you wanted, my job as a ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[16:16\] Yup. |
**Justin Searls:** And so I wouldn't have to really provide a tremendous amount of detail and subject matter expertise. If my business were to be all about and be focused on, and I'm hired as chief product officer to facilitate the FDA approval of highly regulated pharmaceuticals - that job sounds a lot harder, and I h... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. |
**Justin Searls:** So I think the same holds for kind of what you're saying in terms of if I'm building a database engine. That is a very, very challenging product category, because it requires -- and when you think about it, what are the things that are in common between that and the pharmaceutical case? It's like, tr... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that makes a lot of sense. And it just goes to show that sometimes the complexity in the code that you build, and everything around it can make it difficult to answer that "why". I mean, you should still do it, it's still very important, because if developers, software engineers, however you w... |
**Justin Searls:** Totally. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. If you were to describe a development pace that feels sustainable and healthy to you, what would that look like? |
**Justin Searls:** You know, that's a really interesting question, because for me - and it might just be a function of getting older, of being around the bend a certain number of times, on the cadence of different projects of... I used to, especially earlier in my career, I'd feel the ups and downs that came with softw... |
On Monday, say, I would grab a new feature, and I would immediately feel overwhelmed, and I'd feel like I was drowning in complexity around all this stuff that I didn't know, and I would just panic. And on Monday night, I'd come home and my wife would see me in this state and she'd try to console me, right? And then on... |
So what I noticed early on was that I'd have these really high highs and really low lows, and enough so that other loved ones in my life were able to kind of predict my mood based on what they'd seen from me the previous two or three days. |
\[19:58\] And I say that because, to answer your question, I think that it's a very -- I want to like acknowledge and recognize that there are aspects to this work that are deep and creative, and require a lot of asynchronous chewing to successfully build and see the right solution. So even if you could just like, to y... |
And so I think that there is a boundary almost on like us as biological organisms. There's probably an answer there, of different spectrums for different people, for sure, but there's probably something about the cadence of just the way that our brains work, how we exist as social creatures... And that's probably where... |
**Break**: \[22:21\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I've noticed, Justin, that you had just started a Twitter poll recently. And the Twitter poll is -- this the question: "Has the Emergence of DevOps Sped Up or Slowed Down Teams' ability to Deliver Software Overall?" That was an interesting question. I'm wondering what the responses have been so far... |
**Justin Searls:** Yeah, because I have not the most healthy relationship with distractions throughout the day, I have to admit, I've only kind of glanced at a few of the replies... But the reason that I asked the question is because I think a lot about how the advent of sort of mainstream open source software - and th... |
\[24:35\] So I got down that rabbit hole -- of course, it was still incredibly hostile to actually try to contribute to these things, and if you weren't a Unix hacker who was super-comfortable in mailing lists as a modality for how to communicate with humans, it was not at all welcoming. But the advent of GitHub, of co... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So you had 227 votes so far... |
**Justin Searls:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I was one of them. And the majority, 44.5% are saying "Sped up." That's what the majority thinks, and that's what I voted for as well. We may publish at the end of the poll the results in the show notes, so check them out when the episode comes out. |
Okay. So do you think that the DevOps, but more importantly, the automation that seems to be abundant these days - do you think the automation made things better, or do you think it made things worse for shipping software? |
**Justin Searls:** So DevOps, just like so many things in open source, became a hot and trendy buzzword that was heavily marketed and associated with either products or sort of halo projects when it comes to recruiting in like big tech companies. And the original idea that DevOps would be like test-driven development, ... |
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