Based on the 2025 Platform Engineering Pulse report from Octopus, we look at what’s happening in practice. Within the Platform Engineering (PE) community we talk about reducing developer burnout, taking a product not project approach to platforms, and making platforms optional. The reality is that organizations care more about standardization and efficiency and they want […]

DORA has published their latest report and it goes deep into AI-Assisted Software development. It covers the extent of adoption, how it moves the needle on outcomes, and (crucially) what you need in place if you want to succeed. As well as thoughtful and thorough analysis on software delivery with AI assistance, the report also […]

This episodes look at the white paper Achieving Continuous Delivery With TPF by Bob Walker at Octopus Deploy. TPF is a set of three practices that can solve many CI/CD pipeline problems. Find out the core problems and how TPF helps, with some case studies that might hit close to home. TPF is much simpler, […]

Ron Westrum is famous for his classification of organizational culture, but he’s also done great work on hidden events, and information flow. This episode looks at Westrum’s study of information flow and it contains highly relevant lessons for all organizations, not just safety-critical industries. When information fails to flow, it stops the “safe and proper […]

Based on a list of laws, rules, and principles that span Gerald M. Weinberg’s two books on The Secrets of Consulting. These laws are a helpful and amusing way to get into the consultant mindset. They include The First Law of Consulting: In spite of what your client may tell you, there’s always aproblem. And […]

Based on the financial industry survey by Octopus and their Compliance through Continuous Delivery report, this episode shows how recent regulations are increasing the pressure for regulated companies to improve their software delivery performance. You can’t meet the requirements without having a path to production that applies to all changes, whether they are routine features […]

Let’s look at a classic software projects paper published in The Journal of Defense Software Engineering in March 2005. It discusses why software projects fail so often. Some of the concepts discussed are old school and the criteria for success aren’t what we’d use today, but it’s a fascinating snapshot of the problems that were […]

Dave Farley knows a thing or two about Continuous Delivery (CD), so his State of Continuous Delivery in 2025 report based on assessments of consultancy customers is a great insight into how CD is being practiced. Find out what people are practicing, what they are missing, and why we need to overcome the technical skills […]

A big myth of business is that multi-taskers are the go-getters who deliver the most work. The research, though, shows that these multi-taskers deliver work slowly and have problems with quality and accuracy. In fact, the more someone rates their multi-tasking skills, the worse they perform. Find out how researchers tested these ideas to discover […]

A very deep exploration, conducted by METR with 16 open-source developers and 246 real issues, has looked at perceptions and reality of productivity when using AI coding assistants. Titled Measuring the impact of early-2025 AI on experienced open-source developer productivity, the report tackles something we’ve known for a while, our perception of productivity is no […]