Improving Visibility Without Being Annoying w/ Anders Wallgren of Cloudbees

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
It's safe to say that everyone wants more visibility into their software delivery process. But when project management and Git systems don't talk to each other, we only have small islands of visibility and no way to connect them.
That's why I brought in Anders Wallgren, the VP of Technology Strategy at Cloudbees, to help us connect these islands and discuss the outcome-based metrics we should all be using to make the software development process more visible.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:32)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity.
Sign up free at linearb.io.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
Anders, thanks so much for joining today.

**Anders Wallgren** (0:49)
My pleasure. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about, and so just try to get me to shut up.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. I think we're going to have a great conversation here. And so I just want to jump right in. And as most people know, Cloudbees is definitely well known for automating the software delivery process, CI, CD. I think I even used it at my last company, maybe even like 10 years ago or whatever it was.
And while automation is important for a lot of reasons, and especially helping out with all the agile movement and that type of stuff, I feel like it also uncovered a huge problem in the software development process around visibility. So my first question to you is, does the software development delivery process have a visibility problem?

**Anders Wallgren** (1:46)
I think by definition, anytime, yes, by the way, just short answer, yes. I think anytime you've got multiple organizations, multiple teams, sometimes geographically distributed, sometimes distributed across time zones, anytime you have those sorts of scenarios, which obviously is incredibly common and almost mandatory these days, but even in non-pandemic times, there's a lot of geographic distribution happening, you're going to have a visibility problem. You know, not everybody is going to know what everybody else is up to.
You know, not that you need to know that in great detail because that would just be overwhelming, but you know, not everybody's on the same page all the time. And sometimes decisions are made that aren't communicated, things happen that aren't communicated.
You know, it's incredibly important, especially as we're remote and becoming a little bit more remote these days, that everybody kind of knows what's going on. And you know, in the Agile community, you know, one of my favorite authors in the Agile community, Dominica de Grandis, wrote a great book called Making Work Visible. I hope I got the title right. I think that's basically the title.
But really talking about the invisible work that always happens. And I think where it really becomes painful when you don't have visibility into what's happening is you never really know when you're trying to sort of do work estimates and trying to do planning, whether it's a, you know, short kind of sprint plan or a longer term kind of release or multi-sprint kind of plan.
You don't know what you don't know. And when somebody tells you, hey, that's gonna take me two weeks, you kind of sometimes push back on them and say, well, I can't fathom why that would take two weeks. And you have to have it explained to you because not all the work that goes into that two weeks is visible to you. You may not have seen it before. You don't know what it takes. And oftentimes a group of people will get together and think that they've uncovered all the things that they have to do in order to get something done, done, done. And halfway through, they realize, oh, shoot, we forgot something. What about this? What about documentation? What about training the sales force? What about updating the support system so that it knows about this? And whatever it may be, there's always kind of work that's not as visible as it needs to be. And worst case scenario, that means the work just doesn't happen.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:06)
You've kind of brought up two different segments here when it comes to visibility. One side of it is the people side.
So that's kind of like who needs the visibility. And the other side of it is more like the technology side. Like, okay, is this branch associated to this piece of work or this project?
And I wanna dive it into both of those because I think they're important. Let's start on the people side. Do you kind of have an outline in your mind of what type of visibility is needed at each level of the organization?