Contrary to how they are perceived in the media as lumbering dinosaurs, most large organisations have loads of clever people and good ideas.The trouble is these organisations can’t deliver against the ideas. The answer is not “Blue Sky” R&D departments or “BlackOps” teams. The answer is to make the BlackOps approach standard; create an innovation platform built from microservices with new services deployed swiftly into production.
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Author Archives: Mike Brown
Disruptive Innovation is an Illusion Hiding Efficiency
The way I see it disruptive innovation is an illusion to observers who have not had the same focus. From my experience that apparent disruptive innovation actually comes from companies who have invested and honed very tight, very frugal or cost effective product iterations on what is ultimately a predictable destination. In other words, to be truly innovative in a digital landscape you just need to be very efficient.
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Test driven architecture – use your tests to inform architecture
As test-loving development teams, we are all painfully aware of the complexity of getting an application into the zen state of development – quick, test-driven red/green feedback for developers, software designs that are functionally on-the-money from a test-led, “outside-in” approach (from BDD), and a nigh on seamless continuous delivery process as a result. Very few teams achieve this, and those that do are frequently gifted a green-field project in which to engender them.
As test-savvy teams, when tests start to hamper the release process, we often assume our approach to testing needs an overhaul, but that might not be the case. Here we look at the role of architecture in test-driven applications, and examine whether we should listen to our tests to examine our macro design.
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