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You are a reporter for a major world newspaper. Write your response as if you were writing a short, high-quality news article for your paper. Limit your response to one paragraph. Use the following article for context: Hastie: What are the small nudges we can make that move us to a better developer experience?Small nudges for better developer experience [12:22]Adam Kentosh: The best thing that I've seen work for nudges is really still the idea of trials, targeted use cases, where we can actually take a product-centric approach to a team and let them go be successful. And if they can be successful and we can validate that their numbers are what we would anticipate, that they've got great cycle time, that their bugs in code are not there or they're infrequent, I think that gives us justification then to say, "You know what? This is a working model. This is an opportunity to work together better, and it's a way that we can improve our overall performance as an organization".So for me, it's always in doing. I think, in getting out there and actually trying out new models and then making sure that it's a model that can scale. So come up with some best practices and actually be able to take that back to the organization and show real results and real numbers behind it. I feel like that's probably the best way that I think we can continue to nudge, otherwise you're in a position where you're trying to nudge at an executive level, and that can be maybe far more challenging.Shane Hastie: We've known this. As an industry, we've figured this out. We've seen organizations that have done this well, and yet 80% are still mid-transformation. We're still facing a lot of the same problems that all of our methodology changes and everything that we've tried to do over the last couple of decades. Why don't we learn?Finding the optimum delivery frequency [13:58]Adam Kentosh: Well, first off, I'm racking my brain to say, "Have I seen an organization that's done it well?" And I suppose that the flagship examples are maybe your FAANG or MAANG companies, I guess now, but to me they're operating at a different level and they also seem to be producing a lot of this content around some of the more progressive types of development approaches. So if I think about that, and I'm getting off-topic a little bit, but we'll get back around to it, but I think about that, they're pushing and asking for continuous delivery. Let's just be able to deliver on a continuous basis, small incremental chunks. And I think for the vast majority of organizations that I work with in terms of financial services, insurance companies, even some level of gaming, definitely airline, I mean, those companies don't necessarily care about delivery frequency.They're purposefully pumping the brakes on delivery because they want to make sure that they're compliant, they want to make sure that they're secure, and they want to make sure that they're not introducing a poor customer experience with the next release that's going out the door.So in reality, I'd say there are companies I suppose, that do it well, but there are other companies that just maybe don't need to do some of this. And so being pragmatic about what is useful and what will resonate with your organization, and truly at the end of the day, what outcomes you care about. If you care about new features and keeping pace, then certainly maybe continuous delivery makes sense for you. But if you care about stability, well, maybe it doesn't. Maybe there's the better way. And I'm not advocating that people go back to a completely waterfall style of delivery and that we take six months to get a release out the door. That's certainly not, I think the case here, but I think technology has enabled us to take a more, let's call it reasonable approach to delivery, and then also still be able to get better quality, more secure applications that can go out the door.So I know that was sort of a little bit of a segue or a long way away from what your question was, but just something I was thinking about as you mentioned that. Now back to what you were asking, "Why don't we learn?" I think that the challenge is from a developer standpoint, and you'll see this too, if you talk to any developer, one of the things that they really enjoy is just the opportunity to learn new things. And so when you go to a developer and you say, "Hey, we want you to take on testing". "Well, hey, that's interesting. I'll go learn that new thing for a little while". Or, "We want you to take on release pipelines". "Oh, interesting. I'll go take on that new thing for a little while". So I don't think they're shy about saying, "No", or I guess they're happy to say, "Yes", rather and say, "Yes, I want to go learn new things".So for me, I'm not going to pin it all on the developers. It's certainly not all their fault, but we're asking them to do the more, we're giving them an opportunity to learn new things. That means professional development, it means new skills. That's something that they're always after, so they're just going to go do it and they're going to solve a problem. And I find that true for most engineers. I talk to my wife and she always wants to just kind of talk at me, but I always want to solve the problem that she's talking about. And so it's hard for me to stop trying to solve a problem, and sometimes I have to recognize I just need to listen. But I think that's just an engineering mindset. You're always looking to solve a problem. So maybe we run into a situation where the problem's been identified and nobody's doing anything about it and they just go fix it.So why don't we learn? I think that's probably the biggest reason from an individual standpoint. From an organizational standpoint, to me, this could be controversial, but I just feel that maybe organizational structure has not evolved the way that we need it to evolve to support IT. And I know IT is supposed to support the business, and we're supposed to ultimately support the outcomes for our customers. And I definitely recognize that. But internally to the CIO on down who owns testing security and other things, maybe there has to be an evolution there that helps support better collaboration and maybe a more product oriented or product focused approach.Shane Hastie: One of the things that struck me when you were talking about the contrast is those companies that are held up as doing this well, they have a product mindset and they were built from the ground up with the product mindset. So are we asking our "traditional" organizations, these banks, insurance companies, airlines and so forth to fundamentally shift their business model?The challenge for non-product focused organisations [18:50]Adam Kentosh: It sort of feels that way. Now, you can say that those companies are obviously wildly successful, so maybe it makes sense for them to try to shift their business model. But to your point, when you're not built that way from the ground up, there is organizational structure, of course, organizational politics that are going to come into play, there is certainly a level of skill from a just perspective of people that are working there that you have to take into consideration. And so with that, I think that we might be asking companies to act in an unnatural way. And so if we're asking them to act in an unnatural way, I think that's where you get... And we've seen people get into the situation, as I've mentioned, where shift left is now the term, and DevSecOps is definitely still a term in trying to get everybody to work together in a meaningful way without actually maybe changing who they report to or putting them on the same team, truly together.So the way that they're trying to evolve is maybe not necessarily conducive to the way that some of these organizations just grew up from the ground up.Shane Hastie: Adam, there's a lot we've delved into here. What have I not asked you that you would like to get on the table?Software engineering intelligence [20:07]Adam Kentosh: I'd probably say, what is the role of something like platform engineering or DevSecOps and how important is Velocity truly to companies and organizations? And I think Velocity has ruled for the last 10, 15 years. Everything was about getting code out the door faster. And in reality, I think taking a deliberate approach to software development is probably more meaningful. And let's focus not so much on Velocity, but let's continue to focus on the outcomes that we want to deliver for our customers. And again, that kind of goes back to, what is my end goal? Is it a stable customer environment or is it a stable application environment for my customers to operate into? And if so, well then let's just be maybe thoughtful about how we deliver software. And then from a platform engineering standpoint, I think there's value in the idea of platform engineering, but I actually think there's probably almost more value. I shouldn't say more. There's equal value in the idea of something like a software engineering intelligence platform.And Gartner coined this term back in March, and it's kind of interesting as we start to think about it. But if you look at software development, you've got to plan what you're going to build. You've got to code it, you've got to test and secure it, you've got to operate that. And historically we've purchased solutions inside of each one of those areas, and we have engineering processes inside of each one of those areas that have to happen. And that all generates data into its own database. And that's great for business intelligence. It gets us some information from an agility standpoint or an Agile standpoint. We can look at things like cycle time and figure out how our teams are doing.However, when I want to ask real questions as a business leader, when I want to understand how teams are performing across the organization, when I want to understand what changes are coming down the line that are really risky or when I want to understand what teams have the biggest impact to cycle time across the organization holistically, I can't answer those questions with that type of approach.So for me, I think the next evolution that we really need to see, and it's going to set up AI initiatives inside of an organization, which is why this is also important, is the idea of unifying all of that data into a meaningful data lake and then putting engineering processes in place so that we can link the data together. And what I mean by that is if I'm doing a release and I'm not opening up a ServiceNow ticket or some type of tracking for that, well now I can't tie an incident back to a specific release. But if I could, that would be very helpful. And if I can tie a release back to specific stories or features that are actually getting into that release, well that's also very helpful. I still talk to customers every day that spend hours on change advisory board reviews, and they spend hours on tier one resolution calls that they have to jump on, and they've got 80 developers on there. So if it's a situation where we can reduce some of that, that breeds value to an organization, certainly.So I think the important thing is being able to measure where we're at today and being able to unify that data to answer meaningful questions about my organization, then that sets us up for truly applying artificial intelligence and machine learning on top of that data set to help make recommendations. And that's really where I think people want to get to over the next two years as we talk about AI and ML.Shane Hastie: A lot of good stuff here. If people want to continue the conversation, where do they find you?Adam Kentosh: So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can definitely reach out to me as well. I'm happy to have a conversation and talk anytime. I love chatting about this stuff. I'm also very happy to be disagreed with. So if you disagree with what I'm saying, I'd love to hear a counter perspective. I'm fortunate, I get to talk to probably 50 to a hundred customers every year, if not more. And a lot of those are in that large enterprise space. So hearing other perspectives outside of that is extremely valuable for me and helps me understand what are other companies doing, how are they doing it well? And so Yes, LinkedIn is definitely the place to go.Shane Hastie: Adam, thanks so much. Been a real pleasure to talk with you.Adam Kentosh: Thanks, Shane. Appreciate the time today.Mentioned:Adam Kentosh onLinkedInAbout the AuthorAdam KentoshShow moreShow lessMore about our podcastsYou can keep up-to-date with the podcasts via ourRSS Feed, and they are available viaSoundCloud,Apple Podcasts,Spotify,OvercastandYouTube. From this page you also have access to our recorded show notes. They all have clickable links that will take you directly to that part of the audio.Previous podcastsGreat Products Need Closer Collaboration Between Product, Engineering and DesignProduct Mastery in Corporate Software: Insights from Kent McDonaldTechniques to Tackle Technical Debt with Dustin ThostensonEngineering Excellence: Declan Whelan on Technical Health, Agile Practices, and Team CultureRate this ArticleAdoptionStyleAuthor ContactedThis content is in theCulture & MethodstopicRelated Topics:Culture & MethodsDevOpsEngineering Culture PodcastCollaborationInfoQDeveloper ExperienceDevSecOpsCultureTeamworkSecurityAgileRelated EditorialPopular across InfoQHow Functional Programming Can Help You Write Efficient, Elegant Web ApplicationsMeta Releases Llama 3.2 with Vision, Voice, and Open Customizable ModelsOpenAI Releases Stable Version of .NET Library with GPT-4o Support and API EnhancementsGenerally AI - Season 2 - Episode 1: Generative AI and CreativityJava News Roundup: OpenJDK JEPs, Plans for Spring 7.0, JobRunr 7.3, Keycloak 26.0, Debezium 3.0AI, Rust, and Resilience: Key Software Trends Seen by the QCon San Francisco 2024 Program Committee<div class="widget related__content article__widget"> <h3 class="widget__heading">Related Content</h3> <ul class="no-style cards" data-horizontal="true" data-size="xs" data-tax=""> </ul> </div>The InfoQNewsletterA round-up of last week’s content on InfoQ sent out every Tuesday. 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User Query

What is software engineering

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https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/challenges-devsecops-transformation/?utm_campaign=infoq_content&utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=feed&utm_term=DevOps

Response

Software engineering is a discipline that encompasses the systematic application of engineering principles to the design, development, maintenance, testing, and evaluation of software and systems. It involves a variety of methodologies, tools, and practices that ensure the production of high-quality software that meets user requirements, is reliable, and is cost-effective to maintain and upgrade. The field combines knowledge from computer science, project management, and engineering, focusing on improving productivity, managing complexity, and ensuring that the final software product is functional, efficient, and secure.