SD Times January 2022

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Contents

VOLUME 2, ISSUE 55 • JANUARY 2022

FEATURES

NEWS 4

News Watch

8

Open Source 2022: The Year of Awareness

21

Drive better business outcomes with value stream management

21

OutSystems making it easy to scale apps with preview of Project Neo

COLUMNS

Around the industry: Predictions for 2022

page 6

32 GUEST VIEW by Rajesh Raheja Customer-centric development teams

2022: The year of Hybrid Work 33 ANALYST VIEW by Rob Enderle Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8

34 INDUSTRY WATCH by David Rubinstein Data needs to be meaningful

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BUYERS GUIDE Value Stream Management: The practice that finally unites business and IT

page 22

Organizations are creating a new role:

Developer Experience Engineer

page 16

Software Development Times (ISSN 1528-1965) is published 12 times per year by D2 Emerge LLC, 2 Roberts Lane, Newburyport, MA 01950. Periodicals postage paid at Plainview, NY, and additional offices.

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NEWS WATCH MuleSoft’s new API management capabilities These API management capabilities are built directly on the AnyPoint Platform, MuleSoft’s platform for integration, API management, and automation. This combination transforms MuleSoft’s platform into a more open, flexible, and scalable solution so that businesses can create high-quality digital experiences with additional speed.

These universal API management capabilities on AnyPoint Platform can be used to design, build, deploy, operate, and discover all of an organization’s APIs from anywhere in one unified location. This serves the current working world, where teams are spread out and operating in hybrid environments.

Uno Platform 4.0 adds extensions Uno Extensions is based on Microsoft Extensions, which are capabilities that Microsoft extracted from ASP.NET and made them available elsewhere. According to Uno, the idea behind Uno Extensions is that developers shouldn’t have to rewrite code for commonly used functions.

There are about 10 extensions currently available, and one of the main ones is Reactive (MVU-X), which allows for the different states that data can go through to be packaged and sent through a dedicated interface called a Feed.

Navigation is another extension and it provides a paradigm for different types of navigation, including frame-based, modal, selecting a view item, pickers, returning

IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor IBM unveiled its breakthrough ‘Eagle” 127-Qubit Quantum Processor, which taps into the massive computing potential of devices based on quantum physics.

The company also previewed plans for IBM Quantum System Two, the next generation of quantum systems, which will integrate the concept of modularity into quantum computing to allow the hardware to be flexible enough to scale.

The new quantum processor was developed to contain more than 100 operational and connected qubits. It follows IBM’s 65-qubit ‘Hummingbird’ processor, which was revealed in 2020, as well as the 27-qubit ‘Falcon’ processor that IBM announced in 2019.

According to the company, the increased qubit count will enable users to explore problems at a new level of complexity when undertaking experiments and running applications. It can be used to optimize machine learning or modeling new molecules and materials that can be used in a number of scenarios, including discovery of new drugs and innovations in the energy industry.

data, and dynamically adding views to regions.

This release also introduces a preview of a new Visual Studio Code Plugin and Codespaces Integration, which offers benefits like XAML Code Completion, XAML Hot Reload, WebAssembly C# debugging, and more.

Uno Toolkit was also introduced in this release. Uno Toolkit is a set of multiplatform components that WinUI doesn’t offer out-of-the-box, such as NavigationBar, which is a cross-platform navigation solution, and TabBar, which is a primitive control that provides a list of selectable items.

Anaconda launched Embedded Partner Program With this, organizations can embed Anaconda tools, packages, and repositories into their own products and services.

The launch of Anaconda’s Embedded Partner Program brings end users a seamless access experience. Regardless of whether Anaconda is embedded behind the scenes in order

to power a company’s solution or made available directly to an organization’s users, the program provides a reliable and secure method to manage Python environments as well as enjoy the innovations of opensource development.

Anaconda chose to formally release the Embedded Partner Program now as enterprises want access to a supported open-source Python ecosystem for their users, products, and services without needing to worry about security, licensing requirements, or dependency management.

This formal launch also comes on the heels of Anaconda’s recent influx of financing that included investments from Snowflake Ventures and Apertu Capital, an open-source investment firm.

Currently, members of the Embedded Partner Program include App Orchid, Guidewire, IBM, Microsoft, Schlumberger, Snowflake, and others.

In joining Anaconda’s Embedded Partner Program, members also gain support and services, including SLAs for requests, on top of Anacon-

da’s core offerings.

With the Embedded Partner Program, partners have the power to choose how to experience Anaconda. Users can choose to embed Anaconda within their backend systems, allow their customers to create managed Python environments, or provide access to Anaconda’s repository of Python or R Conda packages.

JetBrains previews new polyglot editor Fleet JetBrains has unveiled a preview of its new lightweight IDE, Fleet. The new IDE is built to be simple and smart so that developers can get started with it without too much additional configuration required.

Fleet is a polyglot editor, meaning that it can be used as a single IDE for all languages, rather than making developers open a different IDE for each language they use. It currently supports Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Rust, and JavaScript.

The company plans to extend support to cover PHP, C++, C#,

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and HTML, which are the remaining languages that have IntelliJ IDEs. For simple tasks, Fleet can be up and ready within a second, and for larger tasks, developers can launch Fleet’s full-on environment to gain access to the IntelliJ codeprocessing engine for code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, refactorings, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick fixes.

In addition, Fleet offers a collaborative environment so that developers can work together. Collaborators can be invited to work together, edit and debug code, and perform code reviews. It supports a number of remote work scenarios and can be run locally on the developer’s computer, in the cloud, or on a remote server.

JetBrains Compose Multiplatform reaches 1.0 release Users can now create Kotlin apps on desktop and can build production-quality dynamic web experiences using Compose for Web’s stable DOM API with full interoperability with all browser APIs on the web.

Since Compose Multiplatform is declarative, the code reflects the UI structure of the app so that users don’t have to worry about copying data from model to view or developing UI refreshing logic.

It also offers short iteration cycles via the Preview Tool that allows users to finetune their components/parts of the UI, and create multiple iterations of them without having to rebuild or restart the application, shortening the development cycle.

Beyond the desktop, Com-

pose Multiplatform gives users a powerful, declarative Kotlin/JS API for working with the DOM.

Perforce improves security with Secure Code integration Perforce Software announced new functionality to speed the remediation of discovered defects in automated scans.

This is delivered through integration with Secure Code Warrior (SCW), in which Klocwork customers can instantly connect to resources that explain how to mitigate vulnerabilities.

By connecting the relevant SCW learning resources to the security vulnerabilities as they are detected by SAST tools, Klocwork and the Secure Code Warrior learning platform can empower developers to remediate errors quickly and continuously enhance their skillset.

“Developers need a simplified, seamless way to gain access to the necessary software security training while also maintaining code development velocity. With this integration, we’ve made it easy for development teams to learn as they go, at the relevant time and via the relevant interface,” said Eran Kinsbruner, DevOps evangelist at Perforce. “The knowledge they gain allows developers to work smarter and faster to move projects forward.”

WSO2 closed $90M in financing from Goldman Sachs This influx of capital will be used to accelerate WSO2’s worldwide business expansion, drive growth of the company’s global partner network,

and support the rollout of its next-generation cloud-native solutions for securely delivering APIs, applications and digital services.

These new solutions, powered by Ballerina, will offer users a choice to code or use low code in order to deliver DevOps and modern SDLC practices, including integrated reuse, within and beyond the organization. WSO2 will use this Goldman Sachs funding to deliver a new generation of platform-as-a-service offerings that will help to democratize the adoption of its cloud-

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native technologies for API management, integration, and customer identity and access management (CIAM).

Additionally, WSO2 will invest a portion of the $90 million in extending the capabilities and community around Ballerina, an open-source language for building cloudnative applications. Users of WSO2’s initial commercial solution to utilize Ballerina, Choreo, can collaborate in creating new apps and digital services via code, low code, and no code, regardless of their skill level. z

People on the move n Rebecca Rumbul has been appointed executive director and CEO of The Rust Foundation. She has extensive experience working in international nonprofit management and digital democracy and information rights. She previously served as director of research and engagement at mySociety, which works to bring transparency to government systems. n Lakshmi Sharma has been named chief product officer at Fastly, where she will continue to lead work on products that enable companies to build modern applications and experiences. She has over 20 years of experience in engineering product development, most recently as director of product management for networking at Google Cloud. She has also held engineering leadership roles at Target, Cisco, and Juniper Networks. n OpsRamp announced the addition of three new appointments to its executive team.

Philippe Vincent joined as the new chief operating officer, Bill Talbot as the chief marketing officer, and Suresh Vobbilisetty as the vice president of engineering. According to OpsRamp, the company has grown significantly over the past few years and these new appointments will help the company to grow even further in 2022. n Eric Tschetter has joined Imply as its newest field chief technology officer. Tschetter is one of the original authors of the Apache Druid project, and the other three authors are already in executive roles at the company. As field CTO, Tschetter will identify and develop new strategic avenues for providing value to the company’s customers.

Previously he was a tech fellow at Splunk, distinguished engineer at Yahoo, vice president of engineering and lead architect at Metamarkets, and he worked with diabetes data nonprofit Tidepool.

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Shubham A. Mishra, CEO and Co-Founder of Pyxis One With all the news about protecting, and being transparent about consumer privacy, it only makes sense for consumers to want more clarity on how their data is being used. More information on what consumers are saying yes to when they click on the “I Agree” button of privacy policies is a huge potential story.

Jeff Ton, Strategic IT Advisor, Intervision The last 18 months have brought unprecedented changes in businesses across the globe. Those who had adopted a digital transformation mindset excelled, those who didn’t, well, didn’t. We also saw an acceleration of cloud adoption as organizations realized one way to be agile and elastic was to move all or part of their tech assets to the cloud. Many organizations experienced new-found alignment between their technology teams and their line of business teams. This newfound alignment will translate into more organizations moving down the path of digital transformation. This will result in true transformation not just digitization of existing processes.”

Jim Rose, CircleCI CEO More Code Failures Will Happen, Impacting The Software Delivery Supply Chain.

While organizations rush to meet the needs of an increasingly connected world, the modern tech stack will continue to grow in complexity. Code failures and software bugs will continue to rise, leading to an increase in security incidents, and downtime and outages, wreaking havoc on businesses. Recent incidents with SolarWinds and Facebook (aka Meta) are just small glimpses into the instability of the software delivery supply chain and next year we’ll continue to see code failures that have monumental effects.

Rob Zuber, CircleCI CTO, Predictions The Great Resignation Will Become The Great Reshuffle. 2021 was the year of The Great Resignation, but the dust isn’t settling just yet.

Last year, many engineers and other software professionals were needing a new change of environment, and the pandemic was the catalyst for them to make the change. But some employees are going to realize their new gig isn’t quite the right fit.

Sri Viswanath, CTO, Atlassian Over the next 5 years, Web 3.0 will upend the way we think about application development.

Where Web 1.0 was the era of internet protocols, Web 2.0 is our current state of applications and generated content. Web 3.0 will rise as a result of the cracks in the current system, which puts user data in the hands of social media giants. Powered by blockchain technology, this new version of the web will usher in a decentralized internet and put data ownership back in the hands of the user. For the industry, it will completely change the way we approach application development and privacy.

Ram Chakravarti, CTO, BMC Even more data. We’ll generate about 79 zetabytes of data in 2021, a sum that will more than double by 2025. In the coming year, enterprises will need to orchestrate their data pipelines to obtain a holistic view of the entire organization. They should also adopt DataOps capabilities and agile approaches to data management that allows data engineers, data scientists, and analytics teams to accelerate how data is collected, used, analyzed and where it gets applied.

George Shaw, CEO and founder, Pathr.ai Real-time human behavior analytics for physical locations is paramount for the future of retail.

Online vendors are able to understand the entire customer journey on their site. Brick and mortar companies are not able to easily track their customer’s journey in their store. With growing online sales and the climbing number of digital buyers, it is more important than ever that brick and mortar companies actively study buyer behavior to remain competitive, prevent fraud, and understand how their customers interact in physical spaces. Many companies already monitor their locations for security and safety reasons but are unable to leverage this data for anything else. Pathr.ai’s technology allows for companies to conduct real-time human behavior analytics in any physical location.

Brian Rue, CEO and Co-founder of Rollbar Increased productivity will be needed.

We shouldn’t need 50 products to build software — we should need about 4. There will be a coalescing of the development process so that you can move from tons of tools to fewer. There will be a move toward a tightly integrated set of the highest, or best in class tools. As the development process coalesces your team will automate or eliminate steps in the development process (that you org doesn’t need to do manually anymore) and that will mean dropping the tools in the process that go with those steps.

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Jeff Whitaker, vice president of products, Excelero In 2022 we’ll see more CI/CD workflows embrace Kubernetes in the cloud and adopt containernative storage. Kubernetes is the natural choice for a CI/CD workflow, allowing a tried-and-tested environment, and a way to leverage public cloud resources as a bursting option or in a hybrid deployment. This will be driven as container-native infrastructure in the cloud becomes more resilient and highlyperformant – for example, delivering a 15% to 20% performance increase vs. that of bare-metal infrastructure at a major web firm. New approaches will overcome the limits of scale, allowing for larger and faster results from a solid CI/CD pipeline.

Scott Moore, founder, Scott Moore Consulting Performance testing as a continuous process will become more important than ever. In fact, it will be part of continuous EVERYTHING. Continuous performance tuning changes will gradually be done more by AI and less manually. We will have to let the machines figure out the machines.

Jake Englund, Sr. SRE, Blameless A broadening scope for SREs. As reliability becomes fundamental to a company’s ability to operate, we predict the SRE role will come into its true potential instead of being limited by partial implementation. If SREs are currently like mechanics, fixing cars when they crash, SREs will become more like civil engineers, focusing more on designing the roads for cars. Reliability starts in design, and we see the role of a reliability engineer continue to involve themselves in the earliest stages such as architecture and prototyping. We also see the knowledge base for this role becoming more about learning on the job than coming in with established, specific expertise. As toolstacks get more complex and specialized to each team and purpose, excelling as an SRE depends more on the ability to learn continuously rather than leverage what you already know.

Frank Kilcommins, API Tech Evangelist at SmartBear The ‘20s have all the markings of being the “decade of the API,” all indicators pointing to their proliferation. As technology continues to dominate our lives, APIs are becoming increasingly important, especially with the accelerated digital demands on organizations from the pandemic. Trends coming in 2022 include increasing adoption of API-first and API specifications, increasing relevancy of full lifecycle API management and open standards, richer support for multi-protocol usage, and investment on the team side of API delivery.

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Open Source 2022: The Year of Awareness

BY JAVIER PEREZ

The subject of predicting the future reminds me of a quote from the late comedian, George Burns: “I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.”

Open-source software is pervasive across all industry verticals, and today, more companies use and develop software than ever before, and we don’t need a crystal ball to predict that in 2022, we’ll see even more growth.

A common theme for next year is not only the growth of open-source technologies but also the incremental awareness that we will see across industries. Awareness will fuel open source use and expansion; therefore, 2022 will be the year of awareness and growth.

Here are my top open source software predictions for 2022: Demand for open source skills is going from hot to hotter. The demand for full stack developers will continue to grow because of an increase in popular open-source options, as well as the variety of stacks used in software development, operations, and data science.

Experience in cloud environments and DevOps tooling will continue to be in high demand, just like demand for Kubernetes, Python, PyTorch, and open-source data technologies. Experienced professionals will have plenty of opportunities to change jobs and poaching of experts in open source will increase, just as expected compensation.

Greater awareness of open source security and prevention of supply chain attacks. More CEOs and IT executives will realize how much open source is used in their organizations, and that realization will have a positive impact on security budgets.

Greater awareness of the thousands of open- source libraries used in all softJavier Perez is Chief OSS Evangelist at OpenLogic by Perforce.

ware development will result in an increased use of tools to scan for vulnerabilities in open-source software.

Organizations with more open-source security awareness will keep up with the latest software versions and patches, improving their overall security posture.

Software supply chain attacks occur when threat actors infiltrate third-party software to gain access via an unpatched open source vulnerability or inject malicious software.

Thanks to awareness and tooling, in 2022 we’ll see an improvement in prevention and the growth of open-source tools, such as digital signing services to prevent supply chain attacks.

Widespread adoption of containers and Kubernetes. We’ll see increased adoption of standards for container format and runtime. This adoption will allow for expanded use of compatible open-source container formats from the likes of Docker and Podman under the same standards as those described in the Open Container Initiative. A similar transition from bare metal to virtual machines (VMs), which took place over the last couple of decades, is now being repeated with the use of containers and Kubernetes as well as completing the stack with Kubernetes operators. Despite the learning curve and technical support required, the most successful open-source project in recent times, Kubernetes, is poised to reach new adoption highs in 2022.

Time for awareness and implementation of ethical AI. Opensource software for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and data technologies are reaching mass adoption. 2022 will see AI open-source tooling become increasingly available, including the intersection with containers in growing projects such as Kubeflow. The prediction for 2022 is a significant growth in terms of awareness and implementation of ethical AI. Open-source tools for

ML/DL algorithms to keep them interpretable, explainable, and fair is the ultimate goal. The incremental use of these open-source tools will go a long way in improving and increasing trust in AI applications.

InnerSource will no longer be a secret. More InnerSource projects wait on the horizon — and not only for technology companies. The prediction includes financial institutions, public sector, research centers, and many more.

The use of open source software development best practices and the establishment of open source-like culture behind closed doors in non-open-source software will continue to expand. As a first step before open sourcing projects or just as the latest best practices, organizations will continue to see the benefits of open collaboration, contributions, and velocity.

InnerSource will also increase the use of open-source software and with it, the need for expert advice and support across more open-source packages.

Positive advancement in diversity and inclusion. Open-source software has always been at the forefront of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Being open with freedom has been part of the open source fabric for over 30 years. The open source communities and foundations have risen to the challenge of reflecting the social changes in our society into their projects. In 2022, we’ll see the advancement of and direct results from large number of diversity and inclusion initiatives. A few examples of these initiatives from open source communities include GitHub Diversity, Open Source Diversity, Opensource.com, TODO group, The Linux Foundation SDDI, IBM’s Call for Code, Apache Diversity, and many more.

And while we are on the topic of awareness in 2022, let’s wish everyone more awareness in other important topics outside open-source software; more mental health awareness, more selfawareness and of course, more personal development. A toast for that, and for a healthy and successful 2022. z

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BY JENNA SARGENT

R

emote work was once considered a luxury to many, but in 2020, it became a necessity for a large portion of the workforce, as the scary and unknown COVID-19 virus sickened and even took the lives of so many people around the world.

Some workers were able to thrive in a remote setting, while others felt isolated and struggled to keep up a balance between their work and home lives.

Last year saw the availability of lifesaving vaccines, so companies were able to start having the conversation about what to do next. Should they keep everyone remote? Should they go

back to working in the office full time?

Or should they do something in between? Enter hybrid work, which offers a mix of the two.

A Fall 2021 study conducted by Google revealed that over 75% of survey respondents expect hybrid work to become a standard practice within their organization within the next three years.

Thus, two years after the world abruptly shifted to widespread adoption of remote work, we are declaring 2022 "The Year of Hybrid Work," as workers and companies attempt to regain some sense of normalcy, improve work/life balance, and recon-

nect with coworkers while still retaining some of the benefits of hybrid work.

Typically, hybrid work implies that employees spend some days of the week working from home and some days working in the office. For example, when Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the company’s hybrid work plan back in May 2021, it involved working in the office three days a week and working remotely the other two days.

The plan might look different for every company. Some companies took advantage of having their workforce remote by downsizing their office space to save money. For those companies, the hybrid working plan might involve

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need; they just kind of plug in their laptop and start going.”

Nush predicts that even when companies switch to a hybrid work model, there will still be a lot of demand from employees to stay remote where it’s feasible. So it’s important for companies to slowly make the transition back to the office, otherwise there might be more pushback from employees, Nush explained.

Employees who feel as though they’ve been able to do their job well remotely might question the company on what the benefit of going back or the rationale behind certain decisions around hybrid work.

However, Nush also added that a lot of the push for hybrid work is being driven by employees, not companies.

Because of the current job market and the “Great Resignation,” employees have a lot of power right now.

“It’s an interesting time to see organizations be receptive of that and try to work towards that common goal of let’s navigate through this kind of uncharted area together and at the end of the day identify what’s going to make this all successful and get where we need to go,” said Nush.

The benefits of hybrid work

“hot desking,” which is when a desk is shared by more than one person on different days.

“Hot desking is a term that’s been around even pre-pandemic days for different sales type workers or people who would be more like a road warrior or weren’t always based out of the same office,” said Aaron Nush, technology services architect at SoftwareONE. “Some of those types of processes or theories that we saw pre-pandemic are starting to come back a little bit, where somebody can reserve one out of X number of workspaces, and they can sit down and have a keyboard, monitor, mouse, a desk, phone, or whatever they

There are a lot of benefits to remote work — no commute, more flexibility in the day, fewer distractions and interruptions — but for many there are also a lot of downsides, like social isolation, lack of motivation, and difficulty maintaining a good balance between their work and personal lives.

According to Lara Owen, senior director of Global Workplace Experience at GitHub, the main benefit of hybrid work is that it offers employees the flexibility to work in the style that suits them best. People that thrive in an office setting could go into the office everyday, people who really do well working at home can continue doing that, or people could opt for a mix of the two.

“I prefer the hybrid model of work because of this flexibility — it encour-

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ages and allows for employees to work in the way that works best for them, which can result in greater creativity and happier employees,” said Owen.

Another benefit of this flexibility is that recruiting efforts can be opened up because geographical constraints can be removed and companies can appeal to people with different working needs, such as working parents or caregivers.

“This opens up your talent pool to a wider, more diverse group,” Owen said.

Transitioning from full remote work to hybrid work Even for workers who have spent their entire working career — perhaps even decades — in an office, after two years of working from home, the switch back could be difficult. Workers have gotten used to certain things while working remotely, and teams have started using different tools to communicate and organize their work.

In order to ensure a smooth transition back, Nush recommends taking advantage of those tools that had been used for remote communication, especially if not all members of a team will be in the office at the same time.

JJ Yu, product designer at digital transformation firm Rise8, believes that UX design — and more specifically human-centered design — is the key to successfully implementing a hybrid work model. One mistake she sees a lot of companies making is that they are looking to the Big Five companies and applying the same practices, but it’s important for employers to actually empathize with their employees.

“I think that in itself is quite the biggest hurdle to make out of that entire process is: are these employers willing to empathize with their employees?” Yu said.

She also pointed out that there isn’t a silver bullet to this. “There is no right answer,” said Yu. “I think there’s just a better or worse decision to be made.”

Yu believes the first step a company can take to solve the challenges of returning to the office is to actually take continued on page 12 >

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the time and listen to its employees and their needs.

Communication from leadership is key According to a McKinsey study from April 2021, a lot of workers are feeling like their company’s plans for returning to the office aren’t being communicated well. 40% of respondents said they have not heard any communication regarding the company’s plans, 32% have received vague communications about a plan, and only 32% feel that a plan has been well-communicated to them.

Not knowing what the plans are is causing a lot of workers unnecessary concern and stress. 47% of respondents said they were feeling anxious as a result, and loss of productivity from poor mental health can be as high as $1 trillion per year, according to McKinsey, which highlights the need for clear return-to-work plans.

This also contributes to burnout, which results from long-term stress.

While McKinsey feels these numbers might be an underestimate, 49% said they were at least somewhat burned out, with 10% of U.S. developers feeling burned out to a “very-high degree.”

“Burnout is especially pronounced for people feeling anxious due to a lack of organizational communication.

These employees were almost three times more likely to report feeling burned out. The obvious recommendation for organizational leaders: share more with employees, even if you’re uncertain about the future, to help improve employee well-being now,” McKinsey wrote in the report.

Challenges of working in a hybrid setting Even though Owen believes the main benefit of hybrid work is flexibility, that should not be misconstrued as it being easy.

“The success of hybrid teams hinges on a leader’s ability to make strategic investments and decisions to support dispersed teams, foster a positive company culture across geographies, and empower employees regardless of

Best places to work remotely in the U.S.

BY RANK 1. North Dakota 2. Nebraska 3. Minnesota 4. Colorado 5. Kansas 6. Idaho 7. Iowa 8. Tennessee 9. Washington 10. Illinois

Remote workers can do their jobs wherever they have internet access. That said, some states are more conducive to working online than others. Earlier this year, CNBC used the following factors to rank the ten best states for remote workers: • Broadband connectivity • Electrical grid reliability • Health and health care • Sustainability in the face of climate change • Environmental quality • Inclusiveness • The housing market • Cost of living • The tax burden Source: ziplyfiber.com

whether they are in the office or at home,” said Owen.

One challenge Owen has faced at GitHub is getting the right tone with their communication. Setting clear guidelines and expectations is important, but sometimes tone can get lost in written communication. Because of this, it’s important to find the right balance between asynchronous and synchronous engagement, she said.

Another challenge for companies is not losing sight of their employees’ experiences. Even when some workers are in the office, don’t forget about your dispersed workers. According to Owen, companies that don’t accommodate dispersed workers could lose out on their talent, and managers without training on managing dispersed teams are likely not maximizing productivity.

On the flip side, it’s important to support those who are in the office.

This means investing in tools and technologies that can help on-site workers collaborate with their remote coworkers, such as well-lit, camera-ready “phone booths.”

Another challenge, according to Sagi Gidali, co-founder and CPO at cybersecurity company Perimeter 81, is that there can be a limited timeframe for communicating with coworkers across different time zones. For example, if everyone is working from 9-5 in their local time zones, that gives people from Los Angeles and New York City a five-hour window of synchronous communication every day instead of eight.

This might not seem like a big deal, but if the West Coast employee runs into an issue at 3 PM, the East Coast employee would have already ended their day by that point.

“We try to have as much overlap in our schedules as reasonably possible

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and many team members also make an effort to stay online a bit later to do so,” said Gidali.

Nush, now a lot of organizations are looking back and realizing that they should be working to undo some of those.

Asynchronous tooling is key to connecting employees

Many firms require workers to get vaccine to return to office

Companies that have already been working remotely already know the power of technology in facilitating collaboration.

As an example, at GitHub, they have an intranet site called The Hub, which pulls information from Slack, email, and GitHub, and acts as a central source for that information. GitHub itself also has a number of features that the company uses internally, such as GitHub Issues, which are a way to converse with contributors and manage projects. One benefit they’ve found from using Issues is that it allows work to progress throughout the day without teams needing to constantly connect, Owen explained.

“These records serve as a resource for historical decision-making, knowledge preservation, and snapshots of progress. The ability to capture and share important discussions asynchronously leads to a culture where everyone can do their work in the way that works best for them — driving higher quality, increased productivity, and happier employees,” said Owen.

One of the main reasons that hybrid work is even an option is that vaccines for COVID-19 are now available. But even though they are available, not everyone has chosen to get one.

According to the New York Times’ interactive COVID-19 dashboard, only 61% of Americans were fully vaccinated as of Dec. 15, 2021. This varies by state; 70.5% of all New Yorkers are fully vaccinated, only 64.9% of Californians are fully vaccinated, and in Georgia, 50.1% of the total population is fully vaccinated.

Most of the big tech companies — Google, Meta (previously Facebook), Microsoft, Netflix, and Twitter — all require that employees be vaccinated before returning to the office.

Google recently made headlines when CNBC reported that it has obtained an internal Google memo that notified employees to upload their vaccine documentation by Dec. 3 and that those who didn’t comply with the vaccine guidelines would be placed on paid administrative leave for 30 days starting on Jan. 18. If they still haven’t complied at the end, they would be placed on unpaid personal leave for up to six months, and then terminated.

While many companies may be making internal decisions to require vaccines to keep their employees safe, the Biden administration has also been a driving force behind some requirements. In November, it announced new OSHA rules that would require companies with 100 or more employees to either be fully vaccinated or be tested weekly. Under this rule, employers also need to provide paid time for workers to get vaccinated and require unvaccinated employees to wear a face mask.

Turn the clock back on bad habits According to Nush, there are some lessons to be learned from the initial push to remote work back in 2020, which was hastily done at many companies.

“When people quickly had to pivot overnight from working in an office to working from home, a lot of them didn’t have laptops," said Nush. “They were working on a desktop or something that was still sitting at that office. So a lot of organizations were instructing their workers to use a home computer, sometimes go out to their local electronics store and buy one off the shelf and use that to connect to the environment.

And they were really just trying to scrounge and do whatever they needed to do to get back to work.”

As you might imagine, a lot of bad habits came from this. According to

How will the omicron variant impact hybrid work plans?

For many companies, hybrid work has remained a fantasy throughout much of 2021. Back-to-office dates kept being

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announced, then pushed back, and pushed back again, and so on. And with the emergence of the omicron COVID19 variant and stricter regulations, we might see those dates continue to be pushed back.

Google had been planning to return workers to the office in January 2022, but it pushed that date back in early December.

Ford Motors also announced a delay in returning workers to the office as a result of the omicron variant.

According to Perimeter 81’s Gidali, hybrid work is an ideal model for handling these unexpected issues, such as COVID-19 variants, or even a bad flu season. When one of these issues arises, it’s easy for employees to switch back to working remotely since they are already set up for that.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was common for employees to feel like they had to still come into the office even when they were sick, but the events of the last couple of years and a flexible hybrid working model can help reduce or eliminate that pressure.

Low code helps facilitate productivity, morale Last year, we declared that 2021 would be the year of low-code solutions. Low-code helps increase innovation, reduce development costs, and improve productivity, all of which were a necessity in early 2020 when companies moved from the office to remote work.

Now low-code is helping with the move to hybrid working models too.

According to Deb Gildersleeve, CIO at low-code platform Quickbase, low-code can also help improve employee morale and thus avoid some turnover from The Great Resignation.

“Low-code and no-code allow the people who are able to think up what processes should be to then build it out for themselves, and that is really empowering,” said Gildersleeve. Rather than needing to wait on others to complete a workflow or process, workers can be empowered to complete their portion of the process, and others can continued on page 14 >

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do the same. “It’s not a matter of, oh, I can’t do my thing until they email me this. It puts the power of fixing that problem and improving their day in their own hands.”

Employee experience is a huge part of whether employees decide to stay at

a company or leave it. Anything a company can do to make sure the employee experience is positive will work towards better retention of talent.

“If you’re sitting there and you’ve got issues, and you’re just waiting on somebody else’s to-do list to get them solved, that’s frustrating,” Gildersleeve

said. “And that might be a frustration that could build over time, and it might be the tipping point for you to take that phone call from the next company …

There’s no perfect job, but when you have the ability to improve your day to day, I think that’s what really makes people want to stay with a company.” z

Best jobs for remote work (Degree required)

It is no surprise that computer and mathematical jobs occupy six spots in our ranking (1. Software Developer, 5. Computer Systems Analyst, 6. Data Scientist, 8. Informational Security Analyst, 9. Statistician and 12. Web Developer). According to BLS 2020-2030 Employment Projections, “Computer and mathematical occupations are expected to see fast employment growth as strong demand is expected for IT security and software development, in part due to increased prevalence of telework spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.” These roles continue to be offered as remote positions, seeing that they only require access to a computer.

Source: ziplyfiber.com

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BY KATIE DEE

Dev Manager SERIES

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s development teams continue to grow, the industry has seen a need for a new role: the developer experience engineer. The purpose of this role is to be sure developers have the necessary tools, environment, and processes to foster the best end result. While the concept of developer experience is not new, in recent years this position, and others like it, have emerged organically and

are rapidly gaining traction.

According to Tim Kadlec, performance engineering fellow for WebPageTest with Catchpoint, the role of the DevEx engineer stemmed from recognizing developers as customers. “I think it goes back to the realization that any tool or any product that is aimed at a developer audience, that is your customer,” he said. “So if you’re trying to reach that audience and get them excit-

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Developer Experience Engineer

ed about the project and trying to make sure that they enjoy using it, it is going to have to come through the entire experience from their first contact with the company all the way to when they’re actually using it.” Examining every aspect of the developer’s experience with a certain product or process can lead to less friction throughout the development life cycle.

As this new role gains popularity, its

importance within different organizations is becoming more apparent. “I think the Dev Experience role is important because it’s not traditional marketing, it’s not traditional sales, it’s not a traditional funnel in any way,” Kadlec said, “It’s about how we make sure there is as little friction as possible when developers want to use and engage with different tools and products.” When organizations focus on a developer's experience

with certain tools early in the development process, it can end up saving time later, as a positive developer experience will undoubtedly lead to a more efficient outcome.

According to Jeena James, GM at WebPageTest and leader of its developer team, what makes the DevEx engineer role effective in her organization is the feedback from the end user. “The continued on page 18 >

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users themselves, the developers, also get to see certain areas that they can actually help improve for themselves and have this ability to kind of contribute back,” James said. Having a specific role in place focusing on developer experience gives the developers a place to go with constructive feedback as they work through issues.

Kadlec explained that a role that exclusively focuses on developer experience is no longer a luxury for organizations, but a necessity. “The developer experience engineer,” he said, “they’re the stand-in for the developers who are actually going to be either writing the code internally or using whatever tool… it’s their job to sort of take a lot of that feedback that we’re getting from the community and constantly keep that in mind as we’re looking at things like what features we should build or what gets prioritized and what doesn’t. This is where the developer experience engineer role becomes really important.”

Kadlec explained that the DevEx engineer is also oftentimes the one who helps to keep the team on track with where priorities should and should not lie because they are speaking on behalf of the developer community. “Not even just features and stuff like that but the entire structure of a product and the commercial offering as well, making sure that all of that is fine-tuned in a way that is going to be appealing and convenient for developers,” Kadlec said.

Different approaches to DevEx There are several different ways in which an organization can utilize the DevEx engineer role. Kadlec and James explained that, in their experience, the most effective method is to take a dual approach, “The way we do it here is by treating the role as a split, so maybe half of their time is spent doing traditional engineering. In the case of WebPageTest, that means that half the time our developer experience engineers are building features, fixing bugs, maintaining the actual code base and then the other half of the time is spent on more traditional developer relations activities.

That can be things like content produc-

One role with a dual purpose

Laura Thomson, VP of engineering at cloud computing services provider Fastly, said that she believes there are two aspects that make developer experience as important as it is.

“One is that developer experience is an accelerant for the people that you have in your team already. We all know that it is hard to hire engineers, but developer experience is something you can use to make the engineers you already have more productive. The second part of it is that people who have worked somewhere that has a really good developer experience, will always rave about it… People who work there will say ‘I have all of these great tools at work, I have a great Laura Thomson, Fastly build system, I have great continuous integration tooling, I have great tools to help me do my job better’ and it makes people loyal,” she explained.

In terms of the role of the DevEx engineer, Thomson believes that the need increases with company growth. “As you get to be a certain size as a company, you really do need a team in this area… and sometimes it’s got a different name, sometimes someone who works in this area isn't going to be called ‘developer experience’ or ‘developer productivity’, they might be called a ‘release engineer’ or a ‘build engineer’ but all of those are sort of parts of the same thing,” she said. z

tion in the form of videos or blog posts or documentation or going out there and giving talks or writing sample code, things like that,” Kadlec said. He went on to explain that this split method is important because it ensures that DevEx engineers have a deep understanding of the product itself as well as the needs of the developers working with it.

Another aspect of the role that makes these engineers essential is the relationship they can build with the end user. James said, “When you’re speaking to that audience, to your user who is a developer who can actually fix some of the things that are being asked.. It’s good to have a developer talking to another developer to say ‘I get what you are trying to solve and here's how I would fix it’.” Having a developer on your team as the DevEx engineer serves to make the developers feel seen and heard within the organization.

DevEx is a team sport While having a role central to developer experience in place is crucial, Kadlec also stressed the importance of the rest of the team in ensuring a positive experience for developers. “It’s important to note that the developer experience role does not operate well as an island. If you have a couple of people in the developer experience engineer role but

they’re kind of working detached from these other components of the business and/or they’re not receiving support from the rest of the team, it’s going to fall flat on its face,” he said. Kadlec went on to say that if the whole organization is not working with the DevEx engineer and offering their support and services where needed, the role is essentially useless. Typically, roles within a business are not meant to exist in a vacuum, but rather as an integral part of the organization at large, and the DevEx engineer role is no different.

According to Lei Zhang, head of developer experience at Bloomberg Engineering, while it is important to have the whole organization working with the DevEx engineer, having too much input can sometimes become a hindrance. “I think it’s a fine balance, sometimes you have a very specific problem and we go deep into that problem, but at the same time we always need to have a global view of what the developer needs to do to get a job done and have a really good experience,” he said. Zhang explained that he sees the recipe for a successful team as having the right balance of people focusing on the specific, in-depth problems and people focusing more on the big picture and having that “global view.”

Zhang believes that the DevEx engi-

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neer role, and other positions with the same goal, have become more important in recent years due to the large amount of growth the technology industry is seeing. “I think the tech industry has been growing so massively and there is a specialization in skills and I think developer experience is at the core for developer productivity. Oftentimes, at an organizational level, it is almost the most important thing in order for an organization to have long term sustainable success.”

Zhang said that although developer productivity has always been widely talked about, the shift to developer experience is due largely in part to an increase of this specialization of skills.

With this shift to developer experience, organizations find themselves faced with new challenges to overcome.

Zhang divides these challenges into two common themes, “The first one is the balance between individual or team creativity, and efficiency and sustainability at the organizational level… The second one is when and how we should do tech renovation. I think that successful organizations are likely to have solutions that are highly optimized with the technologies when they were built,” he said.

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challenges like these are resolved, the DevEx engineer role will provide organizations with several benefits.

Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI, said that one of the key functions of the DevEx engineer is that they enable the developer to focus all of their effort on the task at hand. This keeps developers happy and will, in turn, create and sustain developer loyalty within an organization. “If I come to a job and find that I’m spending 5% of my time on that thing that I’m really excited about and 95% navigating the organization, dealing with coordination and project status, meetings, and change management… I’m not going to stick around that long,” he said. Zuber explained that as a developer, an environment like that would not be fulfilling. He said, “[in that environment] I’m not growing in the area that I want to grow in… you want to be working on the thing that

team, whereas all of your teams quite likely have the issue of building and deploying software, for example, so you’re going to focus more energy there… it’s not just about identifying problems, but identifying problems that are most pervasive across the organization, and then helping to solve those,” he explained.

According to Zuber, another benefit of a role like the DevEx engineer is creating an easier process for onboarding new developers. “Developer environment setup is probably a pretty classic problem… If I am a new engineer in this organization, how do I get up and running and understand what I need to understand and have the tools on my laptop to start contributing effectively,” he said. Zuber went on to explain that in a smaller organization this issue would become something of a “labor of love” that would be solved by each indi-

you’re excited about… and so, when my company makes those investments, that gives me the signal that they care about what it is that I’m trying to do and where I’m trying to grow.”

Zuber went on to explain what the life cycle of work might look like for a DevEx engineer, “It would start with understanding where folks are being taken away from the most valuable things they can do, and then looking for those patterns across the organization,” he said. Looking for these patterns helps to tackle the problems that affect the majority of the organization, rather than focusing on only a small percentage of developers. “If only one team has a particular problem, then having a second team build a solution to that problem isn’t particularly high leverage because it’s just getting used by that one

vidual new developer, but in a larger company, this would be something that would fall to the developer experience team, making solving this issue much easier. “How do I just show up and my laptop is ready to go and day one I’m coding instead of day one I’m trying to figure out the 57 pieces that I need to install to start building,” he said.

While it is not impossible for an organization to get by without a role like the DevEx engineer, it has certainly become incredibly advantageous to invest in this position. Zuber said, “I mean, you can totally get by without it… but then you would sort of be burning some goodwill by having engineers who are excited about building products and solving customer problems, invest a bunch of time in just trying to get things to work.” z

Tools and technologies Both of these challenges play a large role in developer experience because they affect the kind of tools and technologies that developers will be interacting with on a daily basis. Zhang believes that devising a plan to tackle these challenges is incredibly important when it comes to maintaining a positive experience for developers as well as sustaining the overall growth of the company.

With this, Zhang also mentioned the issue of inherent bias that may come up as a DevEx engineer. “As a developer we tend to always like the tools we use, we think that our tools are the best and that everyone should be using our tools," he said, "but the reality is that developers have different preferences.” This bias among the developer community can lead to issues with supporting the team while also maintaining organizational consistency. It is the job of the DevEx engineer to mitigate this issue while keeping their own biases in check. Once

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DEVOPS WATCH

Drive better business outcomes with value stream management

BY KATIE DEE

Collaboration between different teams within an organization has become essential in order to bring the most value to the customer. However, optimizing collaboration through value streams while also successfully completing necessary business processes has become somewhat of a challenge in today’s environment. In an SD Times Live! event entitled “Unlocking Real World Outcomes With Value Stream Mapping” a panel of experts discussed how to overcome these roadblocks.

In order to get to the heart of the challenges organizations face with value stream management (VSM) today, the panelists first described what they view as a “good” value stream management process.

According to John Turley, digital transformation consultant at enterprise software solutions provider Adaptavist, “In the real world, we want to see increasing collaboration… So for me, what ‘good’ looks like is a bunch of people collaborating and working together to generate more value than any of them can create on their own.”

The speakers placed an emphasis on measuring the success of your organization’s value stream by the joy people feel in collaborating on and accomplishing certain tasks. When employees are enjoying the work they are doing, it shows in the end result. Matt Saunders, head of DevOps at Adaptavist, said, “The beauty of VSM is that if you do start asking the right questions and you hone in on this single common definition of ‘good’ across the organization… then everyone can start pulling in the same direction to deliver that.”

They also discussed that in order to create the best value streams and therefore provide the best outcome, development teams often find themselves having to move backwards before they can push forwards. They explain that going back to the beginning and really fine tuning their processes and the way in which people collaborate may seem like it is delaying delivery, but in reality it is making it possible for more efficient delivery in the future. Turley said, “It might slow you down early on in the process, when you first make the switch to value streams, but little changes can bring benefits quite quickly.”

Plandek COO Will Lytle added that with VSM, it is essential to never lose sight of your desired outcome. “The outcome is the thing that you’re trying to drive in terms of value stream management. Historically, other functions of the business have done enterprise value mapping for decades, so the whole concept of value stream management isn’t new, it’s just being talked about with slightly different words and in slightly different ways today in technology,” he said. Lytle explained that it is important to have people involved in VSM throughout the entire breadth of the business in order to provide the best overall outcome from your value streams. z

To learn more about optimizing collaboration and driving better business outcomes with value stream management, watch the full talk on demand now.

OutSystems making it easy to scale apps with preview of Project Neo

BY JAKUB LEWKOWICZ

OutSystems has launched a preview of Project Neo, the codename of a platform that combines dynamic scaling cloud architecture and modern CI/CD practices with a low-code environment.

“OutSystems is breaking the boundaries of traditional software development. With Project Neo, we’ve architected a platform that allows any development team to build any app at internet scale,” said Paulo Rosado, CEO and founder of OutSystems. “Developers should be the artisans of innovation in their organization, but they are mired in complexity that stifles their ability to innovate and differentiate. Instead of using their talents to fix, change and maintain code and aging systems, you can give them industry-leading tools that unleash their creativity on your business, and achieve massive competitive advantage.”

Customers can build applications based on a platform that combines containers and Kubernetes with cloud technologies such as serverless, database autoscaling, event and messagingbased orchestration. This enables teams to move legacy applications to the cloud and to build new and more strategic applications, or to embark on digital transformation initiatives.

The new platform automates DevOps processes, managing advanced cloud runtime, auto-documenting code, resolving code dependencies, performing regression testing, and enforcing architectures standards.

It enables developers to make critical changes to applications within hours rather than days or weeks, constantly updates with new cloud technologies, and auto-scales consumer and B2B apps to huge spikes in demand. z

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Value Stream Management: The practice that finally unites business and IT

S

ome 86% of respondents to a Broadcom survey on value stream management indicated they are not doing value stream management right now.

To that, Lance Knight would say, “Yes, you are. You just don’t know it yet.”

Knight, the COO of value stream platform provider ConnectALL, said if a company is already evaluating their processes and looking for areas of improvement, they’re on the path.

Adding the use of tools for value stream management and metrics is important to help you be more efficient at managing your value stream.

For companies creating software — from ideation to production, or code to cloud – they have to make sure there is value in every step of the delivery process, whether the company is measuring those steps in terms of business value or customer experience or finan-

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN cial performance.

And Chandra Ranganathan, cofounder and CEO of the no-code DevOps orchestration platform provider Opsera, said in each of those stages there are multiple tools and multiple processes that coordinate the multiple functions that take software from the idea into the hands of the customer.

But the question, he posited, is, “How do you orchestrate all of that in a way that provides the maximum value at every step of the process, and you identify the bottlenecks, the risks, the defects, and remove them right in in an automated and proactive manner?”

That, he said, is what the DevOps value stream is.

Joining the business and IT Ranganathan said there is an extension of the value stream that involves inte-

grating development activity into the company’s objectives and the customer experience.

And value stream management, according to Broadcom’s chief transformation officer Laureen Knudsen, “it’s the first time we’re tying together the top-tier (business) strategy and flowing work and people, through to customer value. And then there’s the feedback of whether or not you provided that customer value.”

For the past 20 years, organizations have worked to gain agility first in development and then through the entire organization. Then DevOps began about 15 years ago. That, Knudsen said, was about getting the operations piece cemented in. “And it’s the business now that needs to come in,” she said. “And everybody is being judged in the same way, on the same goals with the same objectives, rather continued on page 24 >

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than being siloed. And that’s the only way to flow things.”

Dominik Rose, VP of Product, Value Stream Management at enterprise architecture software provider LeanIX, has spent many years in his career trying to close the gap between business and

IT. “We’re used to seeing that business and IT are not necessarily aligned,” he said. “Looking at it from a software engineer perspective, it’s crazy times.”

On the one hand, he said, if you look into software engineering, you see an industry rapidly advancing in the notion of project to product, using DORA

Defining value In many organizations, one of the first steps to take to derive value from their efforts is to define what value means to them.

And to define that value, there are at least four pieces of information you need, according to Broadcom’s chief transformation officer Laureen Knudsen: It’s the value you want to create, the feature or service you’re going to create, the metrics you want to judge that value by, and the telemetry you need to gather those metrics. “All four pieces need to be built into the plan from the start, in order to get that value and see whether or not you’re getting it.”

Knudsen said starting in strategy, and not in DevOps, is so important. “We’re talking to customers who are saying, ‘My click rate’s going up. Is that good?’ Well, it’s an insurance app, so is that good? No. But it’s a valid question,” she gave as an example.

“They don’t know, they’re just now getting click rates, because that was one of those things that the data people put in and the ops people could grab it.” Her point is that it’s critical to plan all that from the beginning, and then letting that flow through your work.

Another key piece in defining value is defining who the customer is. ConnectALL’s COO Lance Knight said, “People are stuck on the word value. And they’re also stuck on the word customer. Who’s the customer?” If, say, a company refines its value stream to take 20% of waste out of its marketing process so it can afford to spend more marketing dollars with, say, SD Times, who’s the customer? “Value to the company is different than the value to the customer. So until you can define who’s the receiver of the value,” Knight said, you won’t know if you’re delivering value.

Everbridge’s Prashant Darisi, VP and GM for CEM for Business Solutions, said, “You remember this five years ago, vendors would put it on their sheet, three nines availability, four nines availability, and five nines availability, and they would fight on it. And now the customers are saying, ‘Well, duh!’” Now they want to know if the product is easier to use, and if it’s intuitive. So, Darisi said, “I think what’s changing here and what’s driving these concepts, is that one common theme has emerged.

That is, what is your customer experience, because that has now become the key driver for purchasing decisions. So if you want revenue, then you have to innovate.

If you have to innovate, then you have to focus on the value that you’re delivering to the customer.” z

metrics, cloud-native technology and power teams. “There’s so much fun and influence that you can have as a great software engineer today,” Rose said.

But, he continued, the demand on engineering departments is also increasing. “All of a sudden, you need not only to deal with technology, you need to deal with understanding the business,” he said. “And you need to deal with people saying, ‘Can’t we do this with low code? Can we do this with RPA? Do we need the developers?’”

The divide between business and IT is still there. And the bridge-building between helping business people to understand what IT is doing and helping IT people to understand what’s important for business, is still there, he noted. “I told my team after a really, really successful week, that we said we want five new customers. And I almost apologized for, hey I’m the business guy. I’m looking into sales. And I need to educate you that this is what’s paying our salary at the end of the day. It’s having this translator function all the time when I talk about things like this.”

Many people agree that you can’t simply buy a tool and suddenly you’re implementing value stream management. So if there’s no magic bullet for getting it done, the question is, ‘How do you begin?’

Everbridge’s Prashant Darisi said, “We always start with the three P’s: people, then process, then product.” First, it’s important to get everyone in the organization on board with the effort, from the top down, he said. Second, evaluate your processes, to see where things can be done differently, or better, or faster, to be able to accommodate the need for faster delivery. Finally, he said, you need to evaluate your product, to see if that’s what the customers want.

“First you have to nail it, then you can scale it,” Darisi said.

First: People Value stream management is a human endeavor, Knight often says. “Everybody’s saying we’ve got our value stream management solution. We have a value stream management platform. continued on page 27 >

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How does your solution facilitate value stream management?

Laureen Knudsen, chief transformation officer at Broadcom ValueOps from Broadcom is the leading value stream management platform that allows large organizations to deploy and execute a “true” value stream management strategy. Only Broadcom offers an integrated solution with the depth and breadth of capabilities needed to optimize the rapid delivery of customer value, with the scale and customization required by the world’s most complex enterprises.

Unlike other tools and technology that purport to deliver VSM functionality, only Broadcom provides these two key capabilities that are essential for success: l The ability for all value stream participants and stakeholders to plan, align, monitor, track, deliver, and optimize work consistently by its most valuable metric — customer value delivered — while still providing the specialized tools and capabilities needed by each individual role or discipline. l The ability to extend value streams across the enterprise, beyond their traditional home in IT, DevOps and agile management, encompassing the entire value life cycle from concept to cash.

Lance Knight, COO at ConnectALL Have you ever wondered why the vision you have for your business never comes to fruition? If you haven’t, then your executive leadership has.

At ConnectALL we have noticed that executives are growing increasingly frustrated that the plans they have for their organizations are constantly over budget and plagued with delays.

Over the years, we have noticed a common theme: Unpredictability.

There are three primary reasons why this is crushing your business today: 1. Lack of visibility into processes makes planning impossible 2. Lack of relevant measurements hinders their ability to understand their processes 3. Lack of automated delivery processes prevent consistency and repeatability We believe value stream management is perfectly positioned to help. We believe that there are three critical pillars to value

stream management: 1. See your value stream — Visualize the people, processes, and technology 2. Measure your value stream — Capture the most impactful metrics in real time 3. Automate your value stream — Connect all of your tools to optimize software delivery Our platform enables humans to see, measure, and automate their software delivery value streams. That said, no tool can manage your value stream for you. Value stream management is still a human endeavor.

Dominik Rose, VP Product, Value Stream Management at LeanIX LeanIX Value Stream Management (VSM) helps enterprises build reliable digital products faster by streamlining operations for engineering managers, DevOps teams and product IT. Leveraging the company’s Continuous Transformation Platform — the de facto standard for managing technology landscapes — LeanIX VSM connects code to business outcomes by establishing end-to-end visibility into software delivery performance. It provides insights to make data-driven decisions to increase productivity through knowledge-sharing and improved collaboration, while eliminating waste based on flow metrics, and measuring business outcomes and streamlining governance.

LeanIX VSM helps engineering leaders, DevOps teams and Product IT speak a common language to address the complexity of different toolsets, cross-functional processes and new ways of working. Software teams can measure real value to the business while reconciling the needs of engineering teams and IT leadership.

LeanIX VSM connects knowledge and flow processes to improve the reliability of software, allocate resources more effectively, and make decisions more confidently across the organization.

LeanIX VSM includes integrations that expand its extensive cataloging services to connect source data from disconnected teams, tools and environments. Within one holistic solution, LeanIX VSM provides dashboards and reports so teams can quickly surface bottlenecks that exist in engineering pipelines and public cloud and cloud-native instances (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.).

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< continued from page 24 Chandra Ranganathan, co-founder and CEO of Opsera Opsera empowers software and DevOps engineers to deliver software faster, safer and smarter with the first “no-code DevOps orchestration platform” that enables value stream management (VSM) for enterprises.

Opsera orchestrates tools, pipelines and insights by maximizing choice and no-code automation. Through a self-service catalog and tool registry, engineering and DevOps teams can instantly provision and integrate their choice of CI/CD and DevOps tools in their choice of cloud. They can also build scalable no-code pipelines in minutes (for SDLC/software delivery, infrastructure automation and SaaS applications releases), with built-in security, quality and approval gates. Unified and actionable insights are provided with more than 100 KPIs, end-to-end auditing and observability of every tool and task to make troubleshooting, value stream analysis, and compliance a breeze.

Opsera’s capabilities provide significant business value through increased agility and security, as well as reduction of time, cost and risk. Rather than “build it yourself,” developers are freed up to focus on and ship core products faster. Opsera enhances the security, quality and compliance posture of software delivery with a shift-left approach, and increases efficiencies through end-to-end visibility. Last but not least, Opsera provides greater flexibility compared to “black box” solutions and enables better governance over the CI/CD and DevOps ecosystem.

Prashant Darisi, VP and GM for CEM for Business Solutions at Everbridge Our Digital Operations Platform is purpose-built to help organizations of any size to support their Value Stream Management initiatives. As a concept, Value Stream Management has existed for many years, but as DevOps transformations are beginning to mature, we have begun to see its importance as part of the software development lifecycle. The key benefits of Value Stream Management are in delivering greater business value, quicker time-to-delivery and the removal of waste and toil from delivery practices.

Organizations should be focused on thoughtful automation and process simplification that empowers teams to focus their attention on optimizing current solutions and delivering innovative products at scale. Without full visibility of the entire value stream, teams will struggle to identify critical improvement opportunities and solutions.

Our Digital Operations Platform can help organizations: l Rapidly assess digital service disruptions l Act quickly on service disruptions before they impact customer experience l Analyze problems and processes with 360-degree postmortems l Continuously improve processes and services l Gain situational awareness through contextual notifications for fast MTTR With xMatters, an Everbridge Company you can align technical and business goals while enabling your organization to anticipate and address service issues quickly and confidently. See for yourself by trying xMatters free. z

Yes, sure. But what does it do? It helps the human see, measure and automate. You still need to adopt the principles and understand what you want to do.”

Yet purists like Knight suggest value stream management does not require a massive culture change within an organization to implement it.

“This is mapping the value stream, understanding flow, finding waste, and presenting visibility into how things are working. It’s not, ‘we’re in the middle of a culture change.’

This is very black and white, very straightforward.”

Others suggest you can’t achieve value stream success without getting all hands on board with the practice. Everbridge’s Darisi said, start with a culture of training – and it has to be from the CEO down. “How many organizations I’ve been part of where the vice president of engineering or operations or SRE will say, we are adopting this new framework, right? And here’s the methodology we will use, and businesses, we need to do this portfolio management. Then the CEO says, ‘Stop all this nonsense. I want this released by this month.’ So that’s not how we do it. So when I say people, it has to be organization-wide.

Then the processes have to be organizational wide, then the products have to be applicable organization wide.”

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“focus more on business-driven metrics versus just technical metrics. There are metrics like DORA, but how do you piece all of those insights together in a way that actually gives you actionable intelligence that’s aligned to business goals and customer experience? And then there is a closed loop of understanding … did those metrics get met or exceeded? If not, what happened?

And, can you insert that back into your product development or SDLC process?”

COVID-19, he continued, has accelerated multicloud for many mainstream enterprises who have stayed away from cloud in the past.

They’re adopting cloudnative technologies such as Kubernetes and serverless.

All that, Ranganathan said, “just becomes complicated for them. How do they deliver software in that ecosystem, so they can do it fast and stay competitive? So they have to now look at other things like shifting left of security and quality in the software delivery process, and to now have insights across the entire ecosystem so you can stay ahead of the curve in a way that you can have predictive insights.”

This leads to companies using many tools in their SDLC to deliver software, and integrating them in a way that leads to greater insights is vital to value stream management. “

Second: Process Opsera’s Ranganathan said once an organization has embraced a culture of automation, that drives collaboration across multiple teams by reducing risk and costs while increasing speed.

The focus, he said, is to

Third: Product LeanIX’s Rose said IT leaders ask him what value stream management is. “I say, OK, project to product.

And I come with Lean management and all the great continued on page 29 >

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Why adopt value stream?

Change is hard. Organizations don’t change just for the sake of change; they change because they are unhappy with the status quo. “Why does anybody change,” asked Everbridge’s VP and GM for CEM for Business Solutions Prashant Darisi. “I mean, any 12- step process on this planet – self-help improvement, alcohol or drug addiction — every 12-step process starts with the first step of being dissatisfied with where you are right now.”

Perhaps the competition is delivering products faster. Or, your company spent three months on design but the level of defect being seen is almost the same. Or, by the time you deliver the product, the customer has changed their mind, or they have a new idea. “It’s fruitless to have a battle about, ‘Oh, we should all change,’” Darisi said. “It’s the same as saying every-

< continued from page 27

books there, and they understand what I’m talking about. But this term, value stream management, still doesn’t ring a bell for them.”

Of course, as defined in Mik Kersten’s seminal work, “Project to Product,” it’s a shift in mindset from technical output to business outcome, releasing products that align with customer needs and not simply working on technical projects because you can.

To do that, organizations need first to align product developers with business sales and marketing, to ensure a successful delivery.

Broadcom’s Knudsen said, “I mean if you release a product that is sort of like ‘if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?’

If you release a product and nobody knows about it, you lose. It doesn’t matter how cool it is.”

What’s next for VSM? There is a lot of messaging regarding value streams and management these days, as analysts and pundits are calling it the evolution of DevOps. But

body has a car, so I should have a car too. But I have no commute. So I think it needs to start with a simple thing: identification of, is this where you want to be? Is this how you can go where you want to go?”

So value stream delivery means having the capabilities, through integrated capabilities or the connection of different tools, to do continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous security or deployment. “Those are the tools that are typically called value stream delivery,” said Opsera’s co-founder and CEO Chandra Ranganathan. “Value stream management is to be able to extract the insights from all of these tools that enable delivery, and to provide insights that can then allow you to add business value — understand what’s working, what’s not working, and what can be optimized.” z

consultants often have different messaging from vendors, and journalists report different — and often seemingly inconsistent — efforts from the field. This mixed messaging could also be responsible for preventing some organizations from even putting a toe in the water.

“We have to stop confusing people,” ConnectALL’s Knight said. “We have to find a way to continue the evangelical stuff. From an industry, we, all of us trying to play in this space, need to say, ‘This is what it is.’ And until that happens, it’s going to remain fractionalized.” z

The holy grail of predictability Being predictable is a big challenge in software development these days, what with moving requirements, technology decisions changing and people moving on or being moved around.

“How many times have you heard somebody say, ‘Oh, I take the estimate from my engineering team, and then I triple it?’” ConnectALL’s COO Lance Knight said.

“Because it’s not predictable. Imagine if they said they’re going to have this done at that time, and here’s why they feel that based upon these metrics, the analysis, the flow — all of that right now I know.”

The problem with being unpredictable is that you can’t efficiently rally the right resources. One of the biggest of those problems, Knight said, is people who are waiting on this thing to be delivered so they can do their jobs — marketing or sales or whatever. “They’re standing around doing nothing if it’s not ready, or if it’s done too soon, their campaign isn’t totally thought out yet,” he explained.” Now you have a product that’s sitting there that nobody’s actually pushing out. That, in itself, is the value.”

While value stream management isn’t the be-all and end-all to getting to predictability, Knight said, it gives you more information and gets you closer and more knowledgeable about what it’s going to take to accomplish something and it makes you closer to being predictable. z

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A guide to Value Stream Management tools n

FEATURED PROVIDERS n

n Broadcom Software: Broadcom’s innovative ValueOps solution delivers on the promise of value stream management (VSM) as the first to combine business and investment-oriented product management, providing advanced operationally focused agile planning and management capabilities. The integration of Broadcom’s proven Clarity and Rally software products enables every role within an enterprise to fund, manage, track, and analyze unified value streams with a consistent value orientation and methodology. n ConnectALL: ConnectALL is a value stream management company dedicated to helping customers achieve higher levels of agility, traceability, predictability and velocity. ConnectALL’s services and solutions help organizations to connect people, processes and technology across the software development and delivery value stream, enabling companies to align digital initiatives to business outcomes and improve the speed at which they deliver software. ConnectALL’s value stream management platform allows companies to see, measure and automate their software delivery value streams. n xMatters/Everbridge: Automate operations workflows, ensure applications are always working, and deliver remarkable products at scale. xMatters combines with Everbridge Critical Event Management to power the industry’s most robust enter-

n Allstacks: Allstacks gives software organizations clear visibility into project status, team performance, and trends so users can eliminate surprises in software delivery. Our Value Stream Intelligence Platform generates guiding insights for product stakeholders across engineering projects and tools so companies can shape better outcomes. n Apptio: Apptio gives you actionable insights to connect your technology investment decisions to drive better business outcomes. Its ApptioOneMX helps manage IT spend; CloudabilityMX connects IT infrastructure with cloud financial management; and TargetProcess aligns development resources to business outcomes. n Atlassian: Jira Align extends the power of teams working in Jira by connecting business strategy to technical execution while providing real-time visibility at enterprise scale. It allows enterprises to aggregate team-level data and makes all work visible across the organization in real-time. n CloudBees CD brings order and scale to

prise-wide platform to enable organizations to manage both digital threats, along with physical security, enabling the Fusion Center via a single pane of glass. Over 2.7 million users trust xMatters daily at successful startups and global giants including Athenahealth, BMC Software, Box, Credit Suisse, Danske Bank, Experian, NVIDIA, ViaSat and Vodafone. n LeanIX: LeanIX VSM helps enterprises build reliable digital products faster by connecting code to business outcomes. It establishes end-to-end visibility into software delivery performance so that software teams can measure real business value while reconciling the needs of engineering teams and IT leadership. With this single holistic solution, LeanIX VSM provides dashboards and reports so teams can quickly surface bottlenecks in engineering pipelines and public cloud and cloud-native instances (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, etc.). n Opsera empowers Software and DevOps engineers to deliver faster, safer and smarter with the first “no-code DevOps orchestration platform.” Through a self-service catalog and tool registry, engineering teams can instantly provision and integrate their choice of CI/CD and DevOps tools. They can build scalable nocode pipelines with built-in security, quality and approval gates.

Unified Insights and end-to-end auditing and observability ease troubleshooting, value stream analysis, and compliance.

enterprise software delivery with release orchestration, deployment automation, and pipeline and environment management. By taking the manual effort and risk out of releasing software, CloudBees CD gives developers the analytics to measure, audit and improve results. n Digital.ai: Value stream management and value stream delivery solutions optimize and align the software and delivery life cycle with the needs of the business. Its offerings provide a cohesive, data-driven approach to ideate, create and orchestrate the flow of value with measurable business outcomes. n Kovair: The company’s Value Stream Management Platform provides a structured visualization of the key steps and corresponding data needed to understand and intelligently make improvements that optimize the entire process. n Plandek: Its unique capabilities enable Plandek to integrate with multiple value stream delivery tool sets (e.g. Jira, Git, Jenkins, Azure DevOps) and mine the data footprint of software delivery teams in

order to surface meaningful end-to-end delivery metrics used to improve software delivery. n Plutora: Plutora ensures alignment between software development and business strategy and provides visibility, analytics and insights into the entire value stream. Plutora orchestrates release pipelines, manages hybrid test environments, and orchestrates complex application deployments. n ServiceNow: The company’s approach to Value Stream Management leverages key capabilities, from ServiceNow DevOps and IT Business Management, and the Now Platform, working seamlessly with IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, and Governance, Risk and Compliance. n Tasktop transforms traditional businesses into high-performing tech companies by providing a lens for accelerating software delivery. Tasktop’s value stream management platform sits above the entire toolchain, integrating all the underlying tools and objectively measuring flow. z

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Guest View

BY RAJESH RAHEJA

Customer-centric development teams Rajesh Raheja is SVP and Head of Engineering at Boomi.

C

ustomer experience is pivotal to an application’s success; however, many engineering teams are organized in a way that creates pain points for their end users. The problem stems from Conway’s Law, which is a principle stating that an organization’s design and output mirrors its internal communication structure. Often, its execution creates suboptimal, friction-filled customer experiences that do not truly focus on the customer’s problem.

The challenge with traditionally organized teams Traditionally, teams are organized based on a product module, or functional areas, e.g. front end and back end, etc. Per Conway’s Law, the end-result application (or any final product) will reflect these divisions — which can negatively affect customer experience. For example, consider an engineering organization that splits its teams into functional areas, such as UI and server-side teams. Logically it makes sense to divide the workload this way.

However, this strategy eventually results in customers seeing this split in their day-to-day experience with the software, leading to a disconnected user experience.

Many other traditional organizational design approaches suffer from this issue as well. For example, teams organized by a siloed product definition will end up with customers forced to sort out each product's UI quirks and internal intricacies, such as where log files are stored.

The successful adoption of customer-centric organizational design comes down to one word: accountability.

The alternative: customer-centric organized teams To avoid the trappings of organizational division, organizations should consider the problem’s definition to their own advantage. What it really refers to is a customer-centric organizational design that turns the problem on its head, intentionally mirroring the organizational structure with the experience that companies want the customers to see. However, implementing this requires a three-step strategy: Step 1: Define the end-state and desired customer experience. Like most worthwhile investments, it’s time-consuming. Doing it correctly can require some organizations to undergo rigorous customer exploration journeys, ethnographic research or user experience research to understand how cus-

tomers work or what their specific needs are.

However, this time and effort is well spent because it brings engineers and developers closer to their customers. Research like this gives software development teams a crystal-clear definition of what they’re building and what its value proposition to customers is. If done correctly, this strategy will align every team member around a specific charter or goal outcome.

Step 2: Design the organization with clear charters and ownership. When a company has clearly defined their ideal end-state customer experience goal, the next step is to organize the teams centered around the problem domains they’re trying to solve. For example, a company providing intelligent connectivity to help businesses solve automation needs may organize themselves with teams centered around their key value proposition e.g. data readiness, pervasive connectivity, and enabling user engagement. To keep everyone in lock step, each team creates, clarifies, and owns their goals and charter. A team assigned to enabling a seamless user engagement, for instance, wouldn’t simply be divided by a front end and back end. Instead, they’d work towards a charter of “customer journey,” and will embed all the skills needed to deliver it.

Step 3: Communicate (and manage) the change. Implementing a customer-centric organizational change may not only be hard to do, but also difficult to communicate to teams. Successful SaaS teams live and die by their delivery speed, quality, and agility. In a hundred-mile-an-hour environment with many things going on in parallel, the last thing anyone wants to hear is more change.

However, managing this change is not optional.

Supporting the successful adoption of customer-centric organizational design comes down to one word: accountability. Once teams are set with their charter and roles, the product and engineering managers should be accountable for keeping the team on track. Team check-ins and status updates should be done regularly, focused on tracking how they’ve delivered business value. Use metrics to track product and engineering KPIs holistically, including work categories (e.g. features, tech debt, maintenance etc.), and team agility, with pivoting roadmaps that take into account market shifts or new customer demand. z

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Analyst View

BY ROB ENDERLE

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 I

attended Qualcomm’s launch of its Snapdragon 8 platform in Hawaii in December. Saying that the combination of technologies was impressive would be an understatement. The camera’s capabilities are better than a DSLR, the sound quality exceeds what most high-end sound systems can reproduce, and the gaming performance rivals gaming consoles. The peripherals and software applications that make these features shine will differentiate the smartphones and dedicated devices (like handheld gaming systems). The new phones will have potential without them, but users may be disappointed with them.

Impressions I am an ex-professional photographer, and the kind of quality they can get out of the new camera in this platform is a significant change all by itself. I was skeptical because photography was all about lenses back in the day. But this new Snapdragon 8 platform bypasses the lens question entirely. Working with Leica, Qualcomm has achieved the ability to create images that rival those from a DSLR using the processing power in the phone rather than the lenses.

In theory, this could be a far better approach.

You can better assure the quality of electronic parts through the manufacturing and processing stages than you can lenses, which may get scratched during assembly or shipping..

The amazing demonstration included the use of $7K speakers. The sound was full range, uncompressed, and made you feel (when you closed your eyes) like you were right in front of the orchestra.

While most of us do not have sound systems that would do these new phones justice, many of us have high-end sound systems in our cars and are embarrassed by the low-quality sound streams and ripped music we play on them. With Snapdragon 8, we will finally get a sound source that does these upgraded automotive sound systems justice.

The game performance was equally impressive.

We saw several high-end, PC-type games played off the cloud. With Razer, Qualcomm highlighted a handheld gaming system prototype that will be on my wish list for next Christmas. Even though it had yet to be fully tested for use, I played with it a little bit, and the form factor just felt right to me.

Developer opportunity With the camera, the need to create a more intuitive or AI-driven (this new platform has an enhanced AI capability) camera application so users can not only see how good this camera is, but they can do some of the cool stuff this brilliant camera capability enables, like automatically recommending a panoramic shot or doing a better job with the flash so there isn’t so much delay between pushing the button (which can distract pets), and automatically recommending better settings.

Sound will require better speakers and microphones in the smartphones to get the full benefit of this Snapdragon 8 platform. Application-optimized sound output for headphones, earbuds, automotive use (with specifications on high-end cars), and home systems can do this phone’s fantastic music capabilities justice.

Applications that can listen and autotune the sound to optimize for the room or car would be beneficial here and help users get all the benefits from the high-end phone.

Wrapping up: The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 platform is impressive, but the real differentiators will be how developers use these new capabilities while making them more available and valuable to users. At the same time, basic applications and software will work fine for those that want to truly differentiate using the enhanced AI capabilities in the phone to optimize the optical, sound and gaming capabilities.

The winners next year when these new phones finally show up will be those vendors, software, and hardware, which can best highlight these new capabilities. And it is not just software. I expect there will be a market for hardware accessories that will add more stable holding for both gaming and photography, and next-generation headphones, speakers and earbuds that will do the new sound capabilities justice.

In the end, the creativity of the app developers and accessory makers may more define the next generation of high-end phones as they work to make sure we users get all the fantastic, improved performance the Snapdragon 8 platform promises. z

Rob Enderle is a principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

The creativity of app developers... may more define the next generation of high-end phones.

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Industry Watch

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Data needs to be meaningful David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

A

s the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down offices, people have taken to working remotely, and many have even moved from locations where the cost of living is high to places where it’s more manageable.

This raises the issue of data quality, not only in terms of the accuracy of data being input into fields in a database, but the accuracy of the data itself. Direct marketing organizations, for example, are working with data that could now be out of date. “Data needs to be accurate, to real-life information,” said Greg Brown, head of marketing at data quality company Melissa. “That’s where the migratory nature of humans comes into play.

They’re moving jobs, or they’re working from home, or they and their families are moving, changing addresses and phone numbers. So the data needs to be meaningful — not only accurate, but actionable.”

Organizations may be trying to reach contacts at their offices, but now, many are not going in, or haven’t had their mail forwarded to their new location. So, when data becomes obsolete, it’s necessary for organizations that rely on knowing where people work and how to contact them to get the new data. But in many cases, people are reluctant to share that new information, because they don’t know how it’s going to be used or who is going to use it, or share it with other organizations.

It’s that reluctance to provide personal information that creates a kind of conundrum for those kinds of marketing organizations, many of which are rethinking what data they collect and what is most important to them.

Many organizations, though, don’t have the kind of data quality algorithms in place to transform an address that comes in with the street directional missing, or the prefix missing. “We can correct those things getting standardized, and then you can have a much higher match rate against all these other really sophisticated data sets that are out there and available.”

In the healthcare industry, there are other kinds of data that don’t have to do with just location and

Organizations... are rethinking what they collect and what is most important to them.

contact data. There are things like Medicaid claims and making sure the right number is associated with the right patient and claims, and that his physician hasn’t changed or moved.

Colton Brugger works at a health insurance startup called Circulo, which is working to update data systems and use the data they collect to respond to claims. “But the thing is,” he said, “there’s a lot of valuable data that’s going to come in through the claim system about what type of care, what type of experience, who our members are going to see — you know, are they going to emergency rooms, rather than a primary care physician? We want to see that and we want to act on it immediately. So we’re trying to unburden ourselves from old-style systems that are slow to respond to episodes of care.”

Not to mention that changes in the Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have been “kind of a nightmare for a lot of insurance and billing companies because they added the requirement of having zip data,” Melissa’s Brown said. Now, he noted, companies need a zip+4 code, but many only have the fivedigit zip code for a lot of their addresses. “We see a lot of businesses just trying to clean that up just from a medical claims standpoint, for verification of whoever the provider and that they’re providing the service to the patient, who’s then submitting that.”

The thing about data, Brown added, is that it’s not static; it’s dynamic. So staying on top of your contacts is imperative. “If people get more mobile, there’s work from home, or I’m working on maybe an extended vacation or something, you need to be able to be able to identify those types of things.

And really create a more holistic record of every contact so that you can maintain effective but also relevant communication with them.”

This amount of movement surely will make it difficult for companies looking to send holiday gifts to suppliers or customers, whose offices might be shut down. Where you might have sent the big tub of three flavored popcorns or a food gift basket to an office for all to enjoy, you likely wouldn't send one to every person at the company — even if you knew their home addresses. z

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