Steve Fenton

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Articles

Poorly Designed Rewards Crush Improvement Efforts

Jan 24, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Steve Fenton

No matter how clearly we explain what we want, our system of rewards can undermine our efforts to improve. Incentive structures are common in the workplace, whether intentional or not. But when we introduce measures to boost productivity, they nearly always have the opposite effect. Not long ago, the industry tried to gamify the workplace to make it more engaging. But have you noticed that we’ve ended up making games more like work instead? Let’s explore productivity through the lens of gamification.
What Organizations Get Wrong With User-Centricity

Jan 17, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Steve Fenton

Some concepts represent a flash of counterintuitive brilliance and others are obvious when you say them out loud. User-centricity involves listening to the people who use your product or service and incorporating their pain points, needs and desires into your plans. That definitely sounds obvious, yet most organizations don’t do it. Often, organizations believe they understand the problem domain well enough without speaking to users.
Relax About Your DORA Metrics

Nov 20, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Steve Fenton

Our jobs require a certain level of precision, so it’s natural that we’ll want to take an exact approach to our software delivery metrics. Some folks might even like a detailed standard to pin their measurement to so they can be sure it’s exactly right. Investing too much in precision is wasteful and takes time away from something far more important: doing something in response to the data. Why Precision Doesn’t MatterThe DORA metrics are the most popular DevOps metrics.
Speed Means Nothing Without Real Feedback

Nov 13, 2024 | medium.com | Steve Fenton

Steve Fenton·Follow3 min read·--Small batches, often ignored in the quest for speed, can help organizations respond to new conditions or knowledge and change course. While the heavyweight era of software delivery made the mistake of placing far too much value on activity, the agile era puts too much emphasis on speed. Speed myopia means known good things, like small batches, are framed purely in terms of making teams faster.
Free your teams from maintenance tasks with runbooks

Nov 12, 2024 | octopus.com | Steve Fenton

Octopus added a feature to help you automate your operations runbooks in 2019. In our recent webinar, Michael Richardson and I discussed when runbooks became available, why automating them with Octopus is beneficial, and how people use them in the real world. You can watch the webinar or read on to find a summary of all the key points. What's a runbook? A runbook is a set of steps you need to follow to complete a task.
Speed Means Nothing Without Real Feedback

Oct 30, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Steve Fenton

While the heavyweight era of software delivery made the mistake of placing far too much value on activity, the agile era puts too much emphasis on speed. Speed myopia means known good things, like small batches, are framed purely in terms of making teams faster. The other benefits of small batches are ignored and lost in the hurry to optimize straight-line speed. Small-Batch BenefitsSmall batches remove the tangle of complexity that creeps in when you bring too much change together at once.
AI Won’t Fix Your Software Delivery Problems

Oct 25, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Steve Fenton

It’s complicated. While the industry faces crucial debates over intellectual property and the environmental impacts of AI, there is a more fundamental issue: How do we use these tools to deliver high-quality work that benefits our organization and the community it serves? This article doesn’t address ethical or moral concerns but instead focuses on the growing pressure from leaders who want to introduce AI tools to increase productivity.
The 2024 DevOps performance clusters

Oct 23, 2024 | octopus.com | Steve Fenton

With the publication of DORA's State of DevOps Report each year, our understanding of software delivery increases. For over a decade, the research has joined the dots on what makes software teams and their organizations successful. One of the report's highlights is the software delivery performance clusters. These are groups of different performance levels that emerge from statistical data analysis.
Stop Blaming Regulation for Poor Software Delivery Performance

Sep 24, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Steve Fenton

When discussing the incredible insights from the DORA research, it’s common to hear that people in regulated industries think they should aim for a different level of software delivery performance than non-regulated industries. But when the research shows high throughput goes hand in hand with solid stability, how can they be right? We can draw on over a decade of research to bust the myth that high-performance software delivery isn’t for the regulated.
Deploy on Friday? Moratorium Doesn’t Achieve Admirable Goal

Aug 29, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Steve Fenton

Avoiding Friday deployments is driven by a goal that, while admirable, is better achieved in other ways. Yet, organizations are more likely to deploy on Friday than on a Monday, which shows the industry doesn’t buy the myth that you shouldn’t deploy on Friday. Few Practices Are Truly Best PracticesWhile you used to hear about best practices all the time, you’ll have noticed that industry experts have become increasingly cautious about the term.