Thanos Diacakis, a seasoned software engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, discusses the common pitfalls in software development. He highlights the need for a culture shift that balances feature delivery with crucial tasks like bug fixing. Thanos introduces seven mental models to streamline processes and reduce technical debt. He also proposes a four-step framework for team leads to enhance efficiency through iteration and adaptability. Insights on navigating culture and processes further enrich the conversation, aiming to empower teams for better outcomes.
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insights INSIGHT
The Missing Education In Delivery
Engineers learn technical skills but rarely learn how to get software into production.
That gap causes teams to adopt processes without understanding why and leads to delivery failures.
insights INSIGHT
Four Types Of Work Matter
Feature work is only one of four work categories: features, bugs, technical debt/investments, and risks.
Focusing solely on features lets architecture and process collapse under accumulated neglected work.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Target One Bottleneck At A Time
Find the single bottleneck in your delivery pipeline and fix it before moving on.
Repeat: when the bottleneck shifts, identify the next one and invest there methodically.
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This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Thanos Diacakis about how teams often struggle with software delivery. He proposes a shift in mental models and a four-step framework to systematically improve software development by focusing on bottlenecks, balancing different types of work beyond just feature delivery, and investing 20-30% of effort in improving how the team works.
Read a transcript of this interview: http://bit.ly/4gxwKNb
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