Develop, deploy, operate: Three stages of delivering business value with Titus Winters from Adobe

About this episode

Titus Winters discusses optimizing software's commercial value and the role of humans in the deployment phase.

In this episode, Titus Winters discusses his framework for optimizing software’s commercial value, why having humans in the deploy phase is pure toil, and how to think about engineering productivity investments. Titus Winters brings infrastructure thinking to software economics — revealing why manual deployment processes are pure overhead and how to quantify the true cost of defects with a (sometimes) simple formula. His framework splits software into three phases: creative development, factory-like deployment, and operational maintenance, arguing that humans belong only in the first. Find the transcript at: https://www.swarmia.com/podcast/titus-winters-adobe/ (0:00) Introductions (3:58) Why Titus is drawn to this space (6:21) How do you measure the impact of preventing a bug? (8:36) How this paper came to be (10:45) Why is it so hard for non-technical leadership to understand engineering? (12:42) How relevant is the framework for smaller organizations? (13:52) Estimating the true cost of defects (17:40) Measure systems, not individuals (18:25) Why humans in the deployment loop are pure toil (22:17) Why DORA doesn’t measure the squishy, creative part of software development…

People in this episode

Host: Swarmia

Guest: Titus Winters

Topics covered

• software value optimization
• engineering productivity
• deployment processes
• cost of defects
• infrastructure investment

Keywords

• software economics
• engineering productivity investments
• manual deployment
• defect cost
• creative development

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Adobe, Swarmia

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