Why we’ve stopped noticing the real improvement opportunity Since AI arrived, many people have mentioned that the bottleneck has shifted from coding to code review. This isn’t quite right, as coding wasn’t the bottleneck in the first place, and it’s...

Multi-tenancy is an old concept that dates back to machine sharing. It got a new life with the rise of SaaS and the need to share infrastructure and databases across many tenants. Still, with the rise of lightweight virtualization, the idea of managi...

Radical behaviorism is the worst way to build software AI is addictive, and managers are rewarding those who use it the most even though they are shipping stuff they don’t understand. What a tangled mess. Let’s unpack some of the findings from the A...

GitClear's 623 million change analysis shows the output gain is real, and much smaller than the maintenance bill behind it. Since they arrived on the scene, a great swathe of the software industry has pinned its hopes on AI tools, whether that’s ear...

One of the most perplexing discussions I've had in recent times was about CI/CD. I've earned my CI/CD scout badge at this stage in my career, so the confusion caught me off guard. This post briefly sets out what Continuous Integration CI and Continuo...

AI coding agents get better documentation, testing, and workflows than human developers do. And it reveals what engineering leaders have long neglected about human teams. Steve Yegge thinks your AI has feelings. His new two-part essay, “The Shape of...

When you author policies in Rego to be evaluated by Open Policy Agent OPA, there are a whole heap of patterns you can use to make policies correct, safe, predictable, and maintainable. You could write a whole book on this topic, and along with John B...

Winston Royce gets the blame for inventing “waterfall” in software delivery, even though the name was assigned six years after Royce’s paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems. It gets worse for Royce, because the same paper, written ...

When you add approval stages to increase stability, the last thing you expect is instability. That's the opposite of what you wanted. Yet that's what happens when organizations respond to incidents by increasing the weight of change approval processe...

In the previous episode, we talked about different service design approaches/blog/continuous-delivery-office-hours-e4. This time, we dive deeper into database changes. Even for teams that can effortlessly deploy their application code, database chan...

You might be like me. You open the dishwasher and there's no order or discipline to how it's been loaded. If you leave it that way, half of your cups will come out gritty. The baking tray is going to stop the spinning water blade. The bowl is going t...

Why I no longer believe organizations that adopt AI to speed up software delivery In my formative years, I had a Labrador/Whippet cross called Barclay. We did almost everything together. If I was digging a hole in the garden, he would be there snuff...

Did you ever notice how digital task boards are suddenly all the same horrid thing. Heavy engines of compromise that are as happy to supply a Gantt chart and resource plan as they are to give you a Kanban board. Slow and steady, not slow and heavy ...

After tackling the question of which branching strategy is best/blog/continuous-delivery-office-hours-e3, we turn our focus to architecture in this Continuous Delivery Office Hours episode. In particular, we discuss how big your building blocks shoul...

Throughout our history as a species, we have grappled in the quagmire of complexity around the decisions we make. There are ethical, moral, and social impacts to every new development and we continue to navigate this confusing landscape in a process ...

Your branching strategy can support Continuous Delivery, or make it an impossible goal. You should assess the impact of how you branch on your ability to deliver software at all times, and you'll find some branching techniques that work, while others...

Or, why AI systems fail in surprisingly familiar ways. With the introduction of AI-assisted coding tools and agents, many people were hoping we’d solve all the problems of human teams. Without the people, politics, and personalities software deliver...

When you join Octopus, you get a great laptop and your choice from a range of docks, monitors, webcams, and input devices. You also get a home office allowance, which lets you upgrade your space and get 50% back. You may want a sit/stand desk, an awe...

You don't notice your GitHub Actions versions until you start getting warnings about things like "Node 20 is no longer supported". When you think about it, GitHub Actions are yet another dependency that needs to be kept up to date and present supply ...

Vibe coding offered us a tantalizing dream. Have a conversation with AI, forget the code exists, and ship software. This can be a useful way to solve localized and one-off problems. For production systems that need to live, breathe, and evolve for ye...