In the late 1970s, the U.S. automotive industry went into a quality crisis and was surpassed by the Japanese, who could assemble a car comparable to theirs with 60 percent of the effort and far less quality problems. Ford and General Motors eventually realized what was going on in Japan and adopted lean principles to help save themselves.

In the last ten years, tech companies went through a similar change through the adoption of cloud computing and DevOps. The DevOps movement started as a better way for operations and development teams to work together. Since then, it has become an umbrella for all sorts of tools and practices to improve business agility and organizational performance in the Age of Software.

This post is a compilation of ideas from the DevOps community, aimed at companies that have adopted DevOps technologies and practices, but not the culture. Typically, such companies have a functional organizational structure, with role-based teams and people working on many projects. They are on the cloud, but struggle with quality, complexity and ownership issues; have difficulty scaling the teams and aligning on priorities. This post suggests what can be done to improve, and further reading material.

The Technology Radar is a living document to assess the risks and rewards of existing and nascent technologies in an organization. It allows us to visualize the breadth of technology we use and to get opinionated on which technologies we should be either converging on, or moving away from.

QCon London 2020 was five weeks ago, but already it feels like another era. I went to London for the 3-day conference, gathered with thousands of people, went to restaurants and pubs, and a week later went into permanent self-quarantine in Munich due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Looking back, everyone who attended the conference was incredibly lucky: only one speaker canceled, and after a week only two attendees (from the same company) reported coronavirus-like symptoms. Not bad for a conference of over 170 speakers and 1600 attendees! The QEII Centre is huge; hand sanitizers were everywhere and also handed out; and instead of the usual buffet meals, food was offered in bento boxes to avoid contamination.

QCon’s motto is Bleeding-edge for the Enterprise. It is a practitioner-driven conference focused on innovation in enterprise software development and targeted at senior engineers and architects. This was my first QCon—after attending GOTO Berlin in 2018 and CraftConf in 2019—and I was impressed. Here are my takeaways for this year’s event.