Agile Coaches' Corner What is a Full Cycle Developer? with Eric Landes
Today’s episode of Agile Coaches’ Corner is all about full cycle development. Joining your host is Eric Landes — a colleague of Dan’s and a Scrum.org certified professional Scrum trainer.
Eric comes from a DevOps background, originally starting out as a developer. Currently, he serves as a Senior DevOps Consultant, ALM Director, and Solutions Architect. In his roles, he helps clients deliver value to customers in their software delivery pipeline, and has tons of experience leading organizations in adopting Agile and Lean frameworks, like Scrum and Kanban. His specialties are in Agile Project Management, Lean Software Development, Enterprise Project Management Implementation, and many more.
In this episode, Eric explains what a full cycle developer is, what a full cycle development team looks like, who he sees this model working for, how to take steps towards this model and improving your team, and where to get started. He also gives a ton of recommendations, valuable resources, and actionable tips and tricks you can begin using today.
Key Takeaways
- What is a full cycle developer?
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- Your development team has all the skills needed to build, deploy, etc.
- Responsible for the full software lifecycle
- Your team owns it from beginning to end
- What to keep in mind when transitioning to Agile or full cycle development:
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- The journey takes a long time and the company needs to support the workers through structure and community
- A good leader is crucial
- Who does full cycle development work for?
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- It depends on the context — experiment to find out what works for your team
- Not everybody; different models for different organizations
- Identifying the problem you’re trying to solve can indicate which model you should use
- Steps to take towards improving your DevOps team:
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- Measure to help drive improvement
- Monitor things in production so you can give feedback to the team on what’s working and what’s not
- Implement hypothesis-driven development
- Where to get started on your full cycle development journey:
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- Start with Agile and XP principles if you haven’t already
- Check out the Netflix Tech Blog
- Understand the principles and practices of DevOps
- Be sure to experiment, experiment, experiment
Key Learnings:
- A full cycle developer has a general skill set and is responsible for the whole software lifecycle
- The transition to Agile or full cycle development takes a long time — the company needs to support their workers in this transition through structure and community
- The full cycle developer model doesn’t work for all companies; you should experiment to see what works best for your team
- Drive improvement by measuring data and providing feedback
Mentioned in this Episode:
Full Cycle Developers (Netflix Model)
“7 Habits of Successful DevOps” (with Sam Guckenheimer)
Implementing Hypothesis-Driven Development
Eric Landes’ Book Picks
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet
Training from the Back of the Room!, by Sharon L. Bowman
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