Gary Gruver > Quotes

“There is really no bad software development process. There is only how you are doing it today and better.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“consider moving to just-in-time creation of requirements detail to minimize the risk of rework and investment”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“Process is only a second-order effect. The unique people, their feelings and qualities, are more influential”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“Therefore, organizations need to decide whether their primary objective is to deliver long-term accurate plans to its executives or if it is to deliver business value to its customers.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“how teams come together to deliver value in large organizations is the first-order effect, while how individual teams work was a second-order effect. Therefore,”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“intent. Additionally, if executives don’t design the planning process correctly, it can end up using a lot of the organization’s capacity without providing much value.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“business challenges started with a predicament of two-year long development cycles for delivering firmware, and of complex embedded software that had been slowly aging over many years and needed to be re-architected. Big-bang integrations were frequent. Before learning about agile, we had some early improvements and got to the point of 8-week development cycles, a daily build or two, and a nightly smoke test.”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“Until these fundamentals are in place, you will have limited success effectively transforming your processes.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“having a development process that integrates stable code across the enterprise is one of the most effective ways of aligning the work across the teams,”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“every time you see a branch you should ask why it’s there and look for process changes that will address the same need without creating branches.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“If this feedback takes days or weeks to get to them, it is of limited value to the developers’ learning. If”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“If you are going to use automated testing and Continuous Integration (CI) to dramatically improve your productivity, you need to treat your testing investments as being at least as important, or even more important, than your development investments, which is a big cultural change for most organizations. In”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“Always trust that engineers are doing the best they know how or can in the situation. People want to do a good job;”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“It is important to remember that although it is relatively easy to write code, it is very difficult to create a sustainable platform.”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“Executives need to understand the basic challenges of their current architecture and work to improve it over time. The build process needs to support managing different artifacts in the system as independent entities. Additionally, a solid, maintainable test automation framework needs to be in place so developers can trust the ability to quickly localize defects in their code when it fails. Until these fundamentals are in place, you will have limited success effectively transforming your processes.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“This is the worst-case scenario for automated testing: where developers start ignoring the results of the tests because they assume it is a test issue instead of a code issue.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“In large, traditional organizations, however, most of the time individual teams can’t independently deliver value to the customer because it requires integrating work across hundreds of developers and addressing all the inefficiencies of coordinating this work. These are issues that the individual teams can’t and won’t solve on their own. This is why the executives need to lead the transformation. They are uniquely positioned to lead the all-important cultural changes and muster the resources to make the necessary organization-wide technical changes.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“There needs to be a process for moving people or whole teams across initiatives to ensure the right overall business priorities are being developed first.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“One of the most important roles for management is ensuring architectural integrity and sustainability when developing code. One”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“When the frequency of the build and deployment process is fairly low, your organization is able to use brute force to work through these issues. When you increase the frequency, this is no longer possible.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“Expect to create, architect, and maintain at least as much test code and automation scripts as you create production code. Soundly architected test code leads to soundly architected production code that is easy to understand and maintain.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“The leadership team would then spend most of their days walking the floor trying to understand where we were struggling and why. This is a new role for most executives and one we encourage executives to embrace if this process is going to be successful. We”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale

“after you have chosen an approach, you don’t need to worry about getting the advantages of that design because it will come naturally. Where you need to provide management focus is on addressing the disadvantages of your organizational choice.”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“Instead of having a lengthy integration and qualification cycle, an agile process makes it part of the ongoing development process. This shift is accomplished through approaches like continuous integration/delivery, sprints with complete requirements, test-driven design, and automated testing. All this is put in place so that when customers think they have enough of the capabilities ready, the code is close to being ready to deploy.”
― Gary Gruver, Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development, A: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

“how teams come together to deliver value in large organizations is the first-order effect, while how individual teams work was a second-order effect.”
― Gary Gruver, Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale