A key performance indicator (KPI) measures how effective a company’s efforts are at improving their chances of attaining targeted goals. Every time a new target is set, it’s wise and customary to set trackers that monitor if you’re getting closer to the target over time. It’s possible to set and monitor KPIs across any company’s organizational chart, including software companies. This post highlights a few KPI examples across the sales, marketing, digital transformation, and software delivery departments.

Before we dive into the specific KPIs, let’s quickly acknowledge that measuring KPIs across crucial areas of a business adds to its overall…

Plutora Blog — Agile Release Management, DevOps, Software Development, Value Stream Management Reading time 15 minutes

Technical debt is an incredibly useful metaphor in software engineering. It can encourage meaningful conversations about the trade-offs and hard choices that are part of the daily routine of software development teams and organizations. Those conversations can then lead organizations to make smarter decisions on how to allocate their resources and prioritize their various activities. Unfortunately, due to misconceptions and conflicting definitions, the term “technical debt” has become quite loaded. Different people might mean diametrically different things when they say “tech debt,” which reduces…

Have you heard of canary deployments? Also called canary release, canary deployment is an important risk mitigation technique for software releases. Canary deployments allow software organizations not only to limit the damage caused by the release of a faulty software update but also to roll back that update quickly and easily. If your organization isn’t reaping the benefits of canary deployments, you should start ASAP. Canary deployments are essential for ensuring an organization’s ability to deploy high-quality software quickly and consistently. In the hyper-competitive world we live in, speed matters more than ever.

But I bet you have more questions…

Building a product doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort. Thus, you can’t just turn a blind eye while your product’s growing, and you would want to know what’s happening throughout. There are different ways of knowing what’s happening in your product development life cycle. Today, I’m going to talk about one of them: product roadmaps.

In this post, I’ll introduce you to product roadmaps and explain why they’re important for you. Then I’ll give you some product roadmap examples that will show you an idea of how they can be used for different use cases.

What Are Product Roadmaps?

Product roadmaps allow…

Weighted shortest job first (WSJF) acts as a model to prioritize a stream of tasks. For example, a DevOps team often manages multiple initiatives or projects. How does the team know what initiatives they should prioritize?

The WSJF model helps them calculate a score for each initiative. Next, they can sort the initiatives by the scores into a sequence so they know how to prioritize their initiatives. The calculation itself takes as input the cost of delay and either the job duration or the job size.

Let’s first discuss where the WSJF model comes from and why it matters. Further…

The people, process, technology (PPT) framework has been around since the early 1960s. Most businesses used it to improve the operational efficiency of their employees and tools. In the late 1990s, it was popularized in the infosec world by Bruce Schneier. These days, most software companies use the framework for information technology management.

And it’s easy to see why. It helps to map the entire value streams of people, processes, and technology. This helps provide full control and visibility into high-performing teams so they can optimize operations and ship faster.

This blog will help you understand what the PPT framework…

Before you impose a set of tools on your teams, certain considerations have to be taken into account. To start with, how effective are the tools at handling the tasks you have in mind? Then there is the issue of the actual users. Are they keen on taking up new tools? Workplaces often comprise different teams, all of which have staple applications they use to get work done. The tools your software development herd uses can be completely out of phase with those in the finance department.

This is where the technology acceptance model comes in. It can help you…

Every sector has a group of companies working to serve the same purpose. The automobile giants want to build great vehicles, and the companies in the food industry want to provide healthy and tasty food. But have you ever wondered why some companies are doing better than others? How are some of them more successful than the competition? Their success is achieved mostly by making the right decisions at the right time.

People have adopted different strategies, techniques, and technologies to help them make the right decisions. And operational intelligence has brought the winds of change to decision making. …