Creating Small Successes to Prove DevOps Works

A series of advice blogs from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 presenters.

We’ve all heard that the key to DevOps is small successes that you build upon. But what do those small successes actually look like? How do you start?

Top experts from DevOps Enterprise Summit are here to weigh in.

“Pick a team. Automate the build and deploy process with no human touches between commit and deploy. That one step removes significant variability and defect generation. Stabilize your quality signal, even if it means deactivating tests that are failing constantly or randomly. Then, improve your quality signal to continuously move detection closer to the keyboard while keeping hard SLOs on how long it takes to execute tests. Measure, improve, publish broadly and repeat.”
—Bryan Finster, Value Stream Architect, Walmart DevOps Dojo, Walmart

“Allow Dev and Ops to have an airing of grievances. Each team should pick a small thing they could do to solve a problem the other is having. Let them execute.”
—Dave Mangot, Principal, Mangoteque

“Look for the things that people have been putting off ‘fixing’ or ‘improving’ that are simple, quick wins. Identify those that will have broad visibility. Apply DevOps principles to it and then profit!”
—Adam Shake, Director of Site Reliability Engineering, MediaMath Source

“Find a use case, measure current velocity and cycle times and attack the bottlenecks in the delivery.”
—Christopher McFee, Director of DevOps Practices, KeyBank

“Start with the end of the value chain, the last step in the process of delivering value to the customer. Improvements made here are immediately visible; improvements made elsewhere can easily be lost in downstream elements of the value chain.”
—Jeffrey Fredrick, Coauthor of Agile Conversations

“Involve them early, show what’s possible, let them finish it their way.”
—Roman Pickl, Technical Project Manager and Continuous Improvement Agent, Elektrobit

“Start with a small team and prove out the end-to-end ownership of building something they operate at all phases.”
—Jonathan Akers, Product Owner – RadioCentral, Motorola Solutions