At JAX London 2012, I focused on the S in devops – sharing. Agile brought business and developers together. Cloud brought operations and users together. DevOps addressed the gap in the middle where ideas went from development to production and money came back from users. The problem was that this handoff had a massive hiccup.
I structured the talk around four areas that a company goes through on a devops journey. The first is setting the stage: value stream mapping. You get everyone together and map how things actually go from code to production – not how you think it goes, but the reality. It is mind-blowing how different the views are. Once you see the whole delivery stream, the bottlenecks become obvious.
The second area is continuous delivery, which is usually where teams start because it sits right in the friction zone between dev producing code and ops getting it live. The key is creating a shared problem space with a mixed backlog from both sides. The same business people who demand more features are often the ones negotiating stricter SLAs with operations – without realizing those two goals conflict. Putting people physically together, or at least on the same chat and wiki, creates the conversations that break down that wall.
The third area is feedback: monitoring and metrics that go beyond “server up, server down” to capture whether the deployed software is actually bringing business value. And the fourth is embedding knowledge earlier in the value chain – catching defects before they reach production, which saves cost and effort. Through all four areas, the connecting thread is sharing: shared views, shared code, shared backlogs, shared responsibility. Infrastructure as code gives dev and ops a shared codebase. Collocating teams minimizes the effort of communication. None of this is complicated in theory, but like telling children to brush their teeth, it needs constant repetition.
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