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A definition of the role of Architecture is "to make people of varying skill equally as productive".

What role does architecture play in your organization. Are they a net adder or subtractor of velocity?

Emerging frameworks to consider or avoid

This topic is not meant to debate major framework choices like React vs. Vue vs. Angular, but more to call out frameworks you've applied in other areas that have impacted velocity.

Could you share with your peers:

• Two frameworks that have helped
• One framework you wish you could remove

Include some context so your peers can determine if it applies to their situation (e.g., this is a framework for AWS lambda functions).

Some areas to consider:

• Testing
• Validation
• Security
• Infrastructure
• Middleware
  ...

Topic from Kathy Keating

Test, or not to test

A great test approach can help to

• release quality features faster
• lower cost of development and maintenance
• build confidence

Could you share, how you approach testing:

• quality assurance vs quality assistance
• finding bugs vs preventing bugs vs factoring quality in
• manual vs automated

Sharing some of your context would be vital for a good discussion, e.g.:

• the project phase you are at (early startup or a matured product)
• the type of the app (saas app, mobile app or a complex backend system)
• your quality criteria (life/safety critical, business critical, or other level)

"Fear is the mind killer" - Dune

With guard rails, antilock breaks, airbags, etc. care safety has improved, at the same time as speeds have increased.

A common trap organization fall into is worrying too much about failure, rather than focusing on minimizing the cost of failure.

What are ways in your organization that you enable, and embolden, people to move fast.

An idiot's engineer's guide to managing humans

Managing people is way harder than it looks.

Some of us will reach senior technical positions such as VP or Engineering or CTO w/ out any experience managing humans.

I would be interested to receive advice on making this transition, growing this skillset and understanding how others have added this skillset without failing miserably in the process.

Particular topics or ideas:

• Managing expectations across a spectrum of experiences and skillsets
• Setting realistic expectations based upon an employees capability
• Thoughts on Price's Law in a small company and hiring the first 10 engineers.

  The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work.

We probably all know team members that out produce other team members, who they would otherwise be considered equal (or even lesser) to in experience, seniority, access, etc.

What are common attributes, attitudes, tools, or ways of working that contribute to individual team member velocity.

Senior / Mid / Junior Mix

Many teams mix different experience levels on their teams to:

• Maximize velocity relative to cost
• Provide career development opportunities
• Bring new ideas and youthful optimism to the team

The idea mix is of course dependent on your context.

Can you share with your peers:

• What is your mix?
• What is your context?
• Your thoughts and observations

What's working, what's not?

Are you teams collaborating asynchronously or synchronously?

Net positive or negative on development velocity?

Post COVID-19, what will you keep, what will you change?

If work isn't sufficiently ready, or the development team isn't sufficiently ready to work on it, then wait times increase. Developers wait for clarification, they wait to decide on how to proceed, they wait on multiple rounds of PO acceptance or QA verification.

How do you think about, and manage and measure, the work flowing into the team.

In theory, kanban's focus on flow should maximize overall velocity. In practice, kanban creates many management and organizational challenges that increase overhead and waste.

Is kanban in use at your company, or are you aware of any companies using kanban at scale? When is kanban appropriate, generally, and do you have any tips/tricks for implementors.

Release without Fear - CI/CD, DevOps, IaC, ...

Most teams have concluded that the short feedback loops of continuous deployment increase
velocity. The technogies being used have changed rapidly - GH Actions, the serverless framework,
monorepos, test frameworks, feature flags, canary releases, etc.

Can you share with your peers:

• What processes and technologies are you using?
• What's working and what's not?
• Where are you headed in the future?
• Other thoughts and observations?

The idea of technical debt comes from the idea of financial debt, specifically the concept of paying interest.

Sticking with the analogy, debt is useful to accelerate growth. If you get a higher return on capital then the debt service on that capital, you can capture the spread as returns. The key is to ensure you are getting a return above the cost of the debt, and that you can always, under any reasonable circumstances, manage your debt payments.

A more controversial corollary to the idea of technical debt is that if you are not paying interest on something, it's not debt.

How does your organization think about and manage technical debt? Are there common situations where it's a good, or bad, idea?

Relatedly, how do you think about short term vs. long term velocity?

Topic from Kathy Keating

Topic from Rob Pinna

Strong functional managers optimize their silo - sales, marketing, product, development, success, people. That's important, and previous roundtables have focused on optimizing development.

It's also important to optimize across the silos - between the lines on an org chart. That's often harder to do and gets less focus, which means that even simple optimizations can garner big returns. Let's explore why it makes sense to optimize across silos in general, and how to optimize the success <--> product <--> development boundaries in particular.