The need for speed and glorious purpose

In today’s modern software enterprises speed is a very important thing.

Speed as in the ability to iterate fast on requirements and get ideas to market faster than the competition.

Not only it allows to win in the marketplace it also allows you to win internally by motivating the team to raise the bar in terms of skill, mastery and self purpose that drive individuals to excel and grow.

But speed has to be data driven in order to remove distractions and politics out of the way.

By data driven I mean the metrics that a team chooses to pursue have to be visible and public to everyone so that that they can be smart, measurable and put focus in removing distractions.

Examples of smart metrics are :

• Improve the execution of the test suite by 10 minute in 2 or 3 months
• Achieve 80% or above of the test coverage in 6 months
• Have 90% of the responses in the services under 2 seconds

Facebook has this it their ethos, as they say: move fast and break things.

But what if you are you are an established enterprise and you have legacy and you can’t afford to break things ?

Are you doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs and get extinct by the next nexus event ?

Or can you reinvent yourself ? And find new new values, new culture, new glorious purpose ?

And the answer yes you can, reinvention is the natural ability to survive and and adapt in an ever evolving and changing world.

If you can then the question becomes, well how can I this be done ?

Well you have to raise your game, you raise the bar by improving on your test infrastructure, make you test run faster and be able to write more test and validate more scenarios before release code into production.

Raise the bar by adoption of cloud like infrastructure, and become able to deploy code faster to production.

Raise the bar by increase the levels of automation so that repeatable and time consuming tasks can become easy and just status checks.

Try as much as you possible can apply metrics and talk metrics to your team mates, because when you find yourself trying to beat these metrics you are naturally raising the bar and you will find that you are raising to new levels of excellence.