The Software Delivery Notebook

Thierry de Pauw wrote a super-helpful refresher on Continuous Delivery, based on his experiences of organizations who say “we’re doing it”. The refresher looks at the 9 principles, 3 foundations, 3 practices, 1 pattern, and 1 heuristic that de Pauw says are crucial to CD success. There’s also an amazing diagram de Pauw created to […]

Drawing on the findings of the most recent two volumes of the State of Platform Engineering report, this episodes looks at the difference between shift-left and shift-down, portal traps, and abstract requirement satisfaction. There’s also a look at AI in platforms and platforms for AI. There’s also this idea of platform pluralism. We used to […]

CodeRabbit looked at 470 open-source pull requests and produced the State of AI vs Human Code Generation report with their findings. Crucially, AI makes 1.7x more errors, increasing major and critical defects. The AI-authored/assisted changes cause problems with logic errors, security vulnerabilities, and performance regressions (whereas humans are more likely to make spelling mistakes or […]

This week we look at the LeadDev and Honeycomb Engineering Performance report 2025, which is based on 400+ survey responses from engineering leaders. Find out what they’re measuring performance and how they work out whether AI is having an impact.

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 […]