This interview at DevOpsDays Shanghai brought together an interesting combination: Arie Van Bennekum, one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Sun Zhenpeng from the Chinese DevOps community, and myself. The central thread was the relationship between Agile and DevOps, which Arie and I agreed are essentially yin and yang – two expressions of the same underlying philosophy about delivering value through collaboration and fast feedback.
Arie shared the origin story of the Agile Manifesto with context that gets lost in the retelling. The seventeen people in that room weren’t trying to create a movement. They were practitioners who discovered they’d been arriving at similar conclusions independently. The manifesto was a snapshot of shared principles, not a prescriptive methodology. That parallel to DevOps is exact: both emerged from practitioners recognizing common patterns, not from theorists designing a framework.
The question about whether DevOps and Agile practices can deliver 10x improvements generated the most interesting debate. My position is that practices alone never deliver that magnitude of change. A 10x improvement requires a fundamental shift in mindset – how people think about their work, how they relate to other teams, what they believe is possible. You can implement every practice in the book and still operate at 1x if the underlying beliefs haven’t changed. Conversely, teams with the right mindset often achieve dramatic improvements with relatively simple practices.
COVID came up as an unexpected proof point. The pandemic forced organizations to adapt overnight – remote work, distributed teams, accelerated digital transformation. The companies that had invested in genuine agility (not just agile ceremonies) handled the transition dramatically better. Business agility – the ability to pivot in response to changing conditions – turned out to be the ultimate measure of whether an organization had actually internalized these principles or was just performing the rituals.
We spent time on regulated industries, because the audience included many practitioners from finance and government. The common excuse – “we can’t do DevOps because we’re regulated” – doesn’t hold up. Regulated industries can and must transform; the regulations constrain what you deliver, not how you deliver it. ITIL and DevOps aren’t incompatible either, if you read ITIL with an open mind. Scaling these practices across large organizations comes back to trust: educate people so they’re competent, be reliable in your delivery, demonstrate sincerity in your intentions, and show that you care about their success, not just your own.
Watch on YouTube — available on the jedi4ever channel
This summary was generated using AI based on the auto-generated transcript.