Cycle Time is a powerful metric. Google's DORA team has identified it as one of the key DevOps indicators that are scientifically shown to lead to better business outcomes. At Haystack, we often champion it as the first "North Star" metric for evalu...

The term Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) was coined in the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. In essence, stream-aligned teams will typically deliver work rapidly using a platform. Platform teams manage these platforms for...

In the book The Unicorn Project , Gene Kim outlines The Five Ideals underpinning effective technology teams. Locality and Simplicity Simplicity is fundamental to elite engineering teams. Our organisation, process and code must all be as simple ...

Conway's Law Melvin Conway wrote in his paper " How Do Committees Invent " that: Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the...

Value Stream Management (VSM) has been something that has been coming up more and more in the DevOps and EngProd communities. Value Stream Management is about mapping the complete Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), from task prioritisation to ...

In simple terms, Trunk Based Development is about working in small batches and then merging those changes back into a master or main branch in quick iterations. These small batches of work can be merged in multiple times a day, instead of deve...