Episode 11: Understanding Value Streams with Chris Dutta

Why Didn't You Test That?

In this episode with Chris Dutta co-founder and head of consulting at Dragonfly whose focus is on quality engineering, Curiosity Software hosts Huw Price and Rich Jordan explore the exponential benefits of implemening value stream management (VSM). Dutta succinctly describes VSM as a set of activities improving the end-to-end flow, quality and the value that IT provides to broader business objectives, typically through software delivery!

Dragonfly’s product Neuro extracts and understands such activities surfacing them as metrics into a dashboard for VSM discovery. Through surfacing insight from commits and repos relative to active or blocked ticket states this impacts on lead time from development to deployment in multiple Jira instances. An outcome is reducing waste in the SDLC. But how insightful certain tickets are depends on a secondary layer of complexity metrics.

While the purpose is to bring business value to the end user, the benefit of a value stream is not immediately evident. The main question is then how to leverage the metrics but also to avoid gaming them? It’s known that measurements are insightful, but only if used to inform what the business wants. At worst, a siloed value stream pitches measures as weapons which can deflect from continual improvement in flow.

Inevitably, forces existing in large organisations naturally lend themselves to waterfall-esque scenarios. So, in practice there’s many contradictions for product teams to navigate, either from top-down C-Suite colleagues and bottom up from a practitioner perspective. Ultimately, how do you compose an agile certified product team, to distribute knowledge and skillset to enable the value IT provides business?

Project versus product sits at the heart of much of the conversation which tools aside, considers an organisation’s culture in terms of its measure of deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rates, and time to recover against any production failure? These are recognised as Dora metrics which boosted with complexity metrics such as measuring the testability of a system lead to growth and ease of refactoring of a product release.

The Curiosity Software Podcast featuring Huw Price and Rich Jordan! Together, they share their insight and expertise in driving software design and development in test. Learn how you can improve your journey to quality software delivery, by considering how much do you really understand about your systems, and when things inevitably go wrong, why didn’t you test that? Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | Deezer | RSS Feed