Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson asked me recently for advice on working with legacy applications. Check out her piece on it. Here’s the full reply I sent to her in email: Her topics: - The steps someone could take to get themselves up to speed on their employer’s legacy software. - How this knowledge can make them indispensable (I know that term is relative) - Why this type of expertise is so necessary, especially when it comes to integrating said software with new and/or evolving products.

tl;dr Recently, I’ve been in conversations where people throw some doubt on DRY. In the cloud native, microservices mode of operating where independent teams are chugging along, mostly decoupled from other teams, duplicating code and functionality tends to come more naturally, even necessarily. And the benefits of DRY (reuse and reducing bugs/inconstancy from multiple implementation of the same thing), theoretically, no longer are more valuable than the effort put into DRYing off.

A kingmaker in the making. I’ve talked with an old colleague about pitching a developer-based strategy recently. They’re trying to convince their management chain to pay attention to developers to move their infrastructure sales. There’s a huge amount of “proof” an arguments you can make to do this, but my experience in these kinds of projects has taught me that, eventually, the executive in charge just has to take a leap of faith.

Hey, I’ve not only seen this movie before, I did some script treatments: Chief Executive Officer John Chambers is aggressively pursuing software takeovers as he seeks to turn a company once known for Internet plumbing products such as routers into the world’s No. 1 information-technology company. … Cisco is primarily targeting developers of security, data-analysis and collaboration tools, as well as cloud-related technology, Chambers said in an interview last month.

This post is pretty old and possibly out of date. There’s an updated version of it in my book, Monolithic Transformation. In contrast to the way traditional organizations operate, cloud native enterprises are typically comprised of self-motivated and directed teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to make decisions, deploy code, and see if the results helped move the needle. More than just focusing on speed of decision making and execution, building up these intrinsically motivatedteams helps spark creativity, fueling innovative thinking.

Satisfying the mythical auditors is often one of the first barriers to spreading DevOps initiatives more widely inside an organization. While these process-driven barriers can be annoying and onerous, once you follow the DevOps tradition of empathetic inclusion — being all “one team” — they can not only stop slowing you down but actually help the overall quality of the product. Indeed, the very reason these audit checks were introduced in the first place was to ensure overall quality of the software and business.

Healthcare Shift to the Cloud Quickens

As software eats the world, this kind of mismatch between “fail fast” and “must be perfect on day one” will happen constantly. NHS Health Apps Library full of data-spaffing apps, claims studies

“We’ve come to understand that productivity software is always evolving, and it’s our responsibility to bring the customer along a journey of constant improvement as opposed to dropping major releases every few years.” Two points: That stance is fun: we need to put in new features, and we need to educate users about them. This is a tricky position: users don’t know what they want (when they want to stay the same).

I followed up my recent column on DevOps ROI with a podcast on the topic. Back from the podcasting dead, I called up Ed who is actually a real, live “finance person” to walk through what ROI is and how you’d calculate it for something like DevOps. As ever with Ed, it’s a great conversations. Check out the episode listing over on the Pivotal blog for full show notes and the feed to subscribe to if you want more from my Pivotal Conversations podcast.