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About two years ago, Zoopla started wondering how we could measure the overall improvements in performance in the engineering department. We were in the early stages of a program of work called Bedrock . Bedrock was all about making engineering capability more efficient and flexible in responding to the business needs. After researching various options, we decided on the DORA metrics . They provided us with all the necessary insights to track our success, and benchmark ourselves against a definition of good. What is DORA? DORA is the acronym for the DevOps Research and Assessment group: they’ve surveyed more than 50,000 technical professionals worldwide to better understand how the technical practices, cultural norms, and management approach affect organisational performance. (Take a dive into the latest DORA Report and in the book that summarizes the findings: Accelerate ). What are the metrics Zoopla is using? Production deploy frequency - Time between the first commit on a m...

"Whenever there is a product for a customer, there is a value stream. The challenge lies in seeing it!" Learning to See - Shook & Rother Every company today is a software company so the level of innovation and delivery has a direct impact on revenue generation. In order to be successful, businesses must deliver an amazing digital experience, keep up with the latest technologies, deliver value at the speed demanded by customers, and do it all with zero tolerance for outages or security breaches. That's where value stream management comes into play. “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a value stream, you don’t know what you’re doing.” (Martin, K. & Osterling, M. (2014). Value Stream Mapping. McGraw-Hill, p. 15.) Value stream management(VSM) is a change in development mindset that puts the customer at the center. VSM allows teams to measure and improve the software delivery and value flow to customers. The development process is outlined from ideation u...

These unprecedented times have been an unexpected catalyst driving companies to finally get serious about moving to the cloud. The adoption wave started in retail and banking by consumers who were unable to shop and bank in-person and were forced instead to drastically increase their online purchases. As a result, many e-commerce sites hosted on public clouds experienced a Cambrian explosion of activity and business. The impact of the pandemic soon crossed every industry and segment from healthcare and education to hospitality and food services, as more and more companies closed their offices in favor of remote work. With closed buildings came closed data centers and other short-staffing of business-critical services. Coupled with supply chain disruptions of compute, networking, and storage gear, many IT teams were faced with mounting business continuity challenges, which impacted service level agreements, product quality, and ultimately customer satisfaction. The answer to these ch...

Getting started with modern software development can feel overwhelming, particularly if you're trying to build a DevOps team from scratch. Hiring the right DevOps roles may require a blend of art, science, and luck, but it is doable. Here's our best advice on key DevOps roles, and the skills each position needs to make your DevOps team function like a well-oiled machine. Developers: DevOps is a team sport nowadays. Devs test code, act as security champions , provision infrastructure, and write automation scripts… just to name a few of the job requirements. They use scrum, Kanban, or other Agile methods to work in short iterations with regular feedback from the business side or from other clients. The dev role has changed dramatically over the past few years and will likely continue to adopt elements of other roles from UX to business-side subject matter expert. They want to continue to stretch themselves, so keep that in mind. In our 2021 Global DevSecOps Survey , developer...

Today, we are excited to announce the release of GitLab 14.7 with Streaming Audit Events , GitLab Runner compliance with FIPS 140-2 , Group Access Tokens and much more! These are just a few highlights from the 25+ improvements in this release. Read on to check out all of the great updates. To preview what's coming in next month’s release, check out our Upcoming Releases page , which includes our 14.8 release kickoff video. Join us for an upcoming event This month's Most Valuable Person ( MVP ) is Fabio Huser Fabio added support for group access tokens, including a UI and a REST API . The enormity of this contribution shows the breadth of effort this contribution spanned in: one epic , three issues, and over 250 community upvotes for this feature! Previously, access tokens were only available at the project level. There was a workaround that allowed self-managed admins to generate a group access token via the rails console, but that left our SaaS customers in the da...