Recap from #DOES16 CrowdChat #1

Yesterday morning, we hosted a DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016 (DOES16) San Francisco CrowdChat with several speakers from the upcoming event. It was a full house with lots of lively discussion from

• Steve Mayner, SAFe senior program consultant at Scaled Agile, Inc.
• Pauly Comtois, VP of DevOps at Hearst
• Alexa Alley, DevOps program manager at Hearst
• Paula Thrasher, director of digital services at CSRA
• Charles Betz, coordinator at Minnesota State Digital Curricula Initiative
• Jayne Groll, board member at the DevOps Institute
• Jeffrey Payne, CEO at Coveros, Inc.
• Matthew Barr, architect at Akamai Technologies
• Chris McFee, architect at KeyBank
• John Rzeszotarski, director of DevOps at KeyBank
• Electric Cloud’s CTO Anders Wallgren
• and more!

It was a great discussion as we answered questions related to personal experiences around DevOps transformations and best practices. These chats are a fun way to provide the online community a forum to learn about some of the top-of-mind DevOps ideas to be discussed at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. If you couldn’t join today’s chat, below are some of the highlights that certainly got us thinking, as we near the upcoming conference (being held November 7-9 in San Francisco).

Also, if you haven’t registered already, we sent out a reminder on the chat that you can still receive 20% off your conference pass by using promo code “VOTEDEVOPS” at checkout. Better hurry though – this promo ends Wednesday, September 14!

Q: (posed by Jayne Groll) How can we reshape “NoOps” to “NewOps”? What new Ops skills and roles may be needed in a DevOps future?

McFee: “Is it really skills or is it a mindset? There will always be room for smart people that understand change is necessary and help to promote those changes.”

Thrasher: “Ops people need to learn software, developers need to wear pagers and monitor systems. Both sides need to stretch.”

Betz: “When people say ‘NoOps’ mostly they are saying, ‘We no longer need traditional engineering of static asset based, bespoke infrastructure.’”

Barr: “I’ve seen what happens when you don’t have Ops familiar Devs, and no Ops – it ends badly.”

Q: What challenges still remain as part of implementing DevOps in your organization? How are you addressing them?

McFee: “I’d say coming from a large enterprise who had a very small initial focus to begin, scaling the practice out across other areas will be a HUGE focused effort.”

Wallgren: “When you have hundreds or even thousands of applications in a large enterprise, the onboarding process needs to be smooth and repeatable.”

Alley: “Not all teams are comfortable with such a drastic change to their teams yet. You need to start with small incremental changes and show success there before trying to change everything all at once.”

Betz: “In the midmarket I am seeing companies with far more Ops than Dev. If you are sourcing most of your digital services, DevOps applicability is still unclear.”

Mayner: “For our customers it is inviting the rest of the value stream (ops, support, etc.) to the table at the end of the transformation instead of incorporating everyone in from the beginning.”

Q: How important is it to have someone with a DevOps title (i.e. DevOps engineer) on a team? If you have one, how are they making a difference in your DevOps transformation?

Comtois: “The title is less important than the outcomes. If it helps to have the title to drive awareness, that is ok, provided you continue to focus on bringing DevOps culture and ideals to your organization and teams.”

Groll: “Titles or Roles? I think we are getting closer to understanding what key roles may be more universal and needed. What roles do you see emerging in enterprise organizations?”

Alley: (in response to Comtois) “It helps to have a champion and thought leader in the organization that people are comfortable to rally behind to drive change in a large community, regardless of the title.”

Barr: “I’m not a huge fan of the title, personally. It’s all about enabling the communication between Dev, Ops, Sec, QA, etc…”

Q: What do you think is the most important metric when measuring DevOps success?

Rzeszotarski: “Release Velocity is incredibly important but only when combined with number of defects found in Exploratory Testing.”

Comtois: “Not only how quickly you respond to issues, but how well you do so as a team. Do you fluidly fill in the gaps or do you experience a lot of ‘that’s not my job’? Mix hard metrics with soft to get a better picture of tactical and cultural success.”

Payne: “We also measure: How long it takes for a one line change in code to get to production.”

Thrasher: “Cycle Time, Lead Time. Waste/Scrap. The process beginning to end.”

Obviously there were plenty more questions and answers from the crowd – you can read the full transcript here! The CrowdChat itself clocked in more than 1,200 views, 865,000 impressions and nearly 300 posts in less than one hour! Thanks to all who joined and made this chat such a success.

Want to join in on the next conversation? You can participate in the next #DOES16 CrowdChat on October 24, 2016 at 10 a.m. PT.