Sam Guckenheimer on Testing, Data Collection, and the State of DevOps Report - Episode 003

This episode, Jeffrey Palermo welcomes his guest Sam Guckenheimer, to the podcast! Sam is the Product Owner for the Azure DevOps product line at Microsoft, and has been with the Microsoft team for the last 15 years. He has 30 years of experience as an architect, developer, tester, product Manager, project manager, and general manager in the software industry worldwide. His first book, Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, was translated into 7 languages and recognized as a de facto guide for teams adopting Agile practices. He's also a frequent speaker at industry conferences.

Sam explains the exciting new offer around Azure Pipelines for open source teams, changes he has seen in the industry from his many years of working at Microsoft, and some of the biggest changes in how users work with Azure DevOps. He also provides tons of key insights into the findings and research around predicting the impact Microsoft's changes will make on user interactions, good practices around gathering live site telemetry and data collection, architectural (or design decisions or patterns) that help or hurt the live site supportability of a complex system, and key takeaways from his own internal learnings and the State of DevOps Report.

Topics of Discussion:

[:50] About today's topic and guest.

[2:00] What is Sam focusing on now?

[3:11] With many years at Microsoft, IBM, and Rational Software, what changes stand out in the industry in Sam's mind?

[5:51] What's the most exciting part of the Azure DevOps release for Sam? The open source capabilities of course!

[9:29] Why Sam loves open source frameworks.

[11:05] What makes Azure DevOps so successful? And the biggest changes in how engineers work with it.

[15:15] A word from Azure DevOps sponsor: Clear Measure.

[15:43] The findings and research around predicting the impact Microsoft's changes will make on user interactions, their feedback cycle, and applying the "rule of thirds" to make data-informed decisions.

[19:42] Good practices around gathering live site telemetry and data collection through Azure Log Analytics and Azure Application Insights.

[22:42] Other internal learnings: the notion of a production first mindset, designated responsible individual (DRI), and repair items.

[26:56] Has Sam found any architectural or design decisions or patterns that help or hurt the live site supportability of a complex system?

[30:42] Sam's take on APM software and traditional monitoring tools.

[32:36] Sam speaks about the State of DevOps Report and why it is so important.

[36:39] Key takeaways from Sam on the State of DevOps Report and his own internal learnings.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, by Juan J. Perez and Sam Guckenheimer

Azure Pipelines

Agile

Github