Not Actually a DevOps Talk: Beyond Survival is not Mandatory
Speaker: Michael Cote (Pivotal)
For more posts from Spring One 2017, see the Spring One blog table of contents
- Cyclic – digital transformation yet hardly ends well
- Think about how to program your business
- Start by moving things you do yourself that aren’t your business – ex: hosted email
- When people have ideas, they don’t want to be told to open a ticket
Delivering value
- Doing software well is managing chaos on behalf of users
- Top user stories
- User would like software to work
- User would like to accomplish a goal
- Deliver value reliably in small batches – allows to hypothesis/validate quickly/see if worked for user
- When you succeed in solving a problem “merry christmas; here’s another problem to solve”
IRS
- used to have a call center
- problem because people don;t like calling the IRS
- only 37% of calls even got through
- tried feature where could revisit past – people didn’t like either and still called. But fast feedback loop cycle so could move on to next approach
- finally learned all people wanted was to know how much they owe
Agile/teams
- 25 years later, agile practices are still not standard
- Look at which practices each team doing; not how many Certified Scrum Masters you have.
- Waterscrumfall or wagilefall – still doing big upfront analysis before get to team level
- Organization needs to support agile teams
- DevOps team is old name
- Have all roles need on team; fully dedicated to product. Build up expertise and shared knowledge
- Have standardized platform that takes care of basic needs to can focus on delighting users vs needing everyone to be a full stack engineer
- Work closely together whether in person or over video conference. In person probably is better.
- Easy to get stuck doing research when working by self. Easier to stay on task and work 4-6 hours a day.
Operations
- If change nothing, system will stay up and running.
- Developers are the ones who write the bugs.
Scaling
- Don’t be overly ambitious at first. Start with low-risk apps
- Real apps. Not the poor cafeteria app.
- Skunkworks/quarantine yourself. Limit failure.
- Internal marketing – not just email.
Also see booklet: https://cote.io/2016/11/28/cloud2/