Latest from Rob
The Anatomy of a $900,000 Validation Bill
A 50-developer team shipping at an agentic pace will spend roughly $900,000 this year on AI and developer tooling costs. Most of the engineering leaders I’ve talked to saw the compute costs coming. What they didn’t anticipate was where the rest of the bill was hiding. The culprit is a timing problem. Frontier models price […]
Jul 28, 2026 · 3 minAll articles by Rob Zuber
Showing 1–4The Validation Gap Is Costing You More Than You Think
Our latest State of Software Delivery report analyzed more than 28 million CI workflows and found a pattern that should give engineering leaders pause. Average throughput grew 59% year over year. Main branch activity for the median team declined 7%. Teams are generating more code than ever before. Less of it is reaching production. The […]
4 Ways to Uplevel Your Software Engineering Team
In my 20 years leading software development teams, I’ve witnessed the industry’s continuous growth alongside technology’s evolution. The only thing we know for certain is that the industry will continue to change and winning businesses will be those that build with change in mind, backed by effective, fast-moving software teams. This is the year we […]
How to Build a Team That Embraces Metrics
When we talk about metrics in software delivery, a lot of developers think of execution metrics — things like throughput, delivery and number of deploys. But in reality, those metrics don’t motivate anyone — at least not without connecting them to a bigger picture. I’ve worked in software for 23 years. I’m a three-time founder […]