Episode 12: The Legacy System Conundrum with Nalin Parbhu

01/30/24 • 56 min

Welcome to episode 12 of Inside The Outer Loop, hosted by Curiosity Software's Huw Price and Rich Jordan! In this episode, our hosts are joined by Nalin Parbhu, Founder & CEO at Infuse, together they discuss digital transformation challenges for organisations struggling with legacy systems, limited budgets, and a reactive approach to change.

Listen to this episode of the Why Didn't You Test That? Podcast to learn from Nalin Parbhu's experience working with higher education institutions, which face unique challenges due to the complex nature of their systems and integrations. Additionally, discover why digital transformation and cloud adoption are driven by the need for scalability, flexibility, and improved user experiences.

The use of outdated on-premise systems and customization of off-the-shelf solutions has introduced maintenance and upgrade difficulties. Budget constraints and competing priorities impact IT investments, while limited operational budgets often result in a focus on capital expenditure, leading to delayed or constrained IT initiatives.

Huw Price describes how testing and quality assurance play a crucial role in successful software implementation. However, the lack of standardized processes and the use of point-to-point integrations and legacy systems has led to increased complexity and higher maintenance costs.

Nalin Parbhu concludes that organisations are finally starting to recognize the importance of automated testing and the need for disciplined test environments and data management. Rich Jordan adds that there's a need for clear requirements, well-defined acceptance criteria, and accountability to ensure successful partnerships and quality.
Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!

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Episode 11: Understanding Value Streams with Chris Dutta

In this episode with Chris Dutta co-founder and head of consulting at Dragonfly whose focus is on quality engineering, Curiosity Software hosts Huw Price and Rich Jordan explore the exponential benefits of implemening value stream management (VSM). Dutta succinctly describes VSM as a set of activities improving the end-to-end flow, quality and the value that IT provides to broader business objectives, typically through software delivery!

Dragonfly’s product Neuro extracts and understands such activities surfacing them as metrics into a dashboard for VSM discovery. Through surfacing insight from commits and repos relative to active or blocked ticket states this impacts on lead time from development to deployment in multiple Jira instances. An outcome is reducing waste in the SDLC. But how insightful certain tickets are depends on a secondary layer of complexity metrics.

While the purpose is to bring business value to the end user, the benefit of a value stream is not immediately evident. The main question is then how to leverage the metrics but also to avoid gaming them? It’s known that measurements are insightful, but only if used to inform what the business wants. At worst, a siloed value stream pitches measures as weapons which can deflect from continual improvement in flow.

Inevitably, forces existing in large organisations naturally lend themselves to waterfall-esque scenarios. So, in practice there’s many contradictions for product teams to navigate, either from top-down C-Suite colleagues and bottom up from a practitioner perspective. Ultimately, how do you compose an agile certified product team, to distribute knowledge and skillset to enable the value IT provides business?

Project versus product sits at the heart of much of the conversation which tools aside, considers an organisation’s culture in terms of its measure of deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rates, and time to recover against any production failure? These are recognised as Dora metrics which boosted with complexity metrics such as measuring the testability of a system lead to growth and ease of refactoring of a product release.

Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!

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Episode 13: Learning from Software Failures

Welcome to episode 13 of Inside The Outer Loop! In this episode, the from the Curiosity Software team, Ben Riley, Rich Jordan and Paul Wright, discuss their learning, experimentations and experiences with failures.
This episode of Why Didn't You Test That? Emphasises the value of experimentation and learning from failure, and why it's key for organizations trying to foster innovation and continuous growth. Highlighting the importance of creating a culture of psychological safety where individuals feel comfortable making mistakes, and embracing failures as opportunities to learn and improve.
Paul Wright recalled a failure he experienced in a previous role, relating it to a lack of communication and alignment within an organization. The failure emphasised the importance of understanding how a new idea or initiative fits into the larger business strategy. Effective communication and alignment between departments can prevent internal competition and ensure that efforts are coordinated towards a common goal.
The podcast also covers the challenge of software design for higher education institutions. Due to resource constraints, these institutions often struggle to engage in early design phases and shift left in the testing process. However, there is a growing recognition of the benefits of early involvement to customize solutions and ensure better alignment with specific needs. This highlights the importance of finding ways to overcome resource limitations and actively participate in software design. Seek out and watch/listen to the complete episode 12 to learn more!
Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!