The success of a modern software delivery effort depends on a broad range of cultural, technical and procedural factors. Efforts to identify what these factors are started soon after computers were invented. The field is probably more than half way to discovering how to do this job well, but the answer is not getting any shorter. Additional factors continue to be discovered and refined in amazing detail.
How can a leader ensure that all the factors needed are present in an organisation?
Techniques such as Squad Healthcheck allow a team to autonomously determine the completeness of their own learning journey, and allow for managers to offer support where teams have issues in common. But while Squad Healthcheck has proven popular and scalable, it only offers only a broad picture of your teams' situation, with limited depth.
Developed by Team Topologies and DevOps innovator Matthew Skelton for Conflux Digital the Software Delivery Assessment is a set of six themes and 66 success factors. The assessment follows the same operating model as Squad Healthcheck but is expanded both in breadth and considerably in depth.
When to use the technique
The technique is easy to apply and results simple to analyse so it can be run as often as needed. Many teams value quarterly sessions covering all the themes.
We believe the technique is particularly useful at times of change, where there has been a turnover of staff, redundancies, where teams have been drastically reconfigured, or in startups or new departments where teams are new.
In short: at any time you have reason to believe that the best cultural, technical and procedural factors have been eroded.
Themes and Cards
The first theme is a slightly extended version of the Squad Healthcheck cards, taking into account the insights of Google's Project Aristotle. The other five themes cover diverse areas of engineering practices in the same or greater detail.
- Team Health
- Deployment
- Flow
- Continuous Delivery
- Operability
- Testing and Testability
Expressed as a card deck, each suit represents a software delivery theme. Individual success factors within each theme are distilled onto the 66 cards in the form of a goal, and a description of healthy and unhealthy practices.
Our decks also include 1 set of numbered cards to help team members give a clear answer quickly.
How to play
Setting Up
- Find a facilitator, the game materials, and gather your team.
- Keep a stack of index cards handy.
- Plan ahead to ease a roll out. Ensure a shadow is present to witness the facilitation and learn to facilitate sessions on their own.
- We recommend playing with the 98 card deck and a set of A1 posters. To save time, put up as many posters as possible before the start of the session, distribute the score cards and separate the suits.
Playing the cards
- Offer the suits one at a time.
- Players should take to turns to read the text on the next card. This is a simple way to keep them engaged and ensure the whole team is listening.
Where it came from
The Software Delivery Assessment represents thousands of pages of knowledge from several named authors such as Henrik Kniberg, Mirco Hering, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, Don Reinertsen, Dave Farley, Alex Moore, Rob Thatcher, Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Steve Freeman, Nat Price, Michael Feathers, Ash Winter and Rob Meaney. Matthew used his years of consulting experience and insights to identify the key elements from all this reading and distill them into a brief card deck. The results have been tested successfully at enterprises around the world by Conflux Digital.
