Article Roundup - May 22, 2020

Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals
Remember those super cool videos from Spotify on how they set up their agile teams? The ones that get you all excited for how smoothly agile can go? Turns out it doesn’t work as advertised and was never fully implemented.

Introducing the AWS CDK public roadmap
I am currently making use of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and it is a phenomenal improvement over working with JSON and YAML CloudFormation templates. Being able to write the code in TypeScript and have type checking provides a great first hurdle to making sure things are correct. You can even add unit testing of your infrastructure configuration, which while cool I am still not sold on in all cases. Having a public roadmap should make it easier to determine where the CDK is going and provides a higher level of confidence that it is getting the support it deserves.

Gone Are The Days Of Vertically Sliced Stories
I found this story interesting because many of the people on my current project are vehemently opposed to anything that isn’t a vertically sliced user story, and yet that is increasingly not feasible. As microservices continue to take over, multiple frontends get added, and the breadth of applications grows it becomes less and less possible to have vertically sliced stories. Developers can’t know every part of the system or simply can’t perform the story in a sprint, even with multiple members of the team working together.