This post is adapted from the 2021 DevOps Enterprise guidance paper by Chris Hill, Tom Limoncelli, Dr. Gail Murphy, Cornelia Davis, and Dwayne Holmes. In many organizations, engineers spend too much time waiting for infrastructure change requests. Limited resources cause infrastructure-dependent changes to lag behind, increasing development demand. GitOps presents one solution by repurposing your organization’s existing Git pull-request workflows to permit infrastructure-oriented teams to … [Read more...]
Five Papers to Improve Software Delivery
Measure Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Culture to Optimize DevOps Transformation Metrics for DevOps initiatives Successful software outcomes depend on negotiation of requirements, accurate scoping of work, value judgments, innovations, team collaboration, software architecture, economic tradeoffs and user demand. Success is less dependent on contract quality, Gantt charts, critical path schedules, earned-value measurement, laws of physics, material properties, mature building codes, and … [Read more...]
Getting Started with Dojos for Technology Organizations
With the new digital economy, many organizations are facing an unparalleled rate of change and having trouble keeping up. Agile/DevOps Dojos can be a uniquely powerful vehicle for accelerating digital transformation in an enterprise. This post will explain what an Agile/DevOps Dojo is, how to maximize the power of it, and how to create your own company Agile/DevOps Dojo. Written by experts in the field, Ross Clanton (formerly of Target and Verizon, and currently of American Airlines), Jaclyn … [Read more...]
What is GitOps?
By Cornelia Davis, Chris Hill, Dwayne Holmes, Tom Limoncelli, and Gail Murphy There isn't really clarity in the industry as to what GitOps is. After two days of discussion and consensus building at the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Forum, a team of experts came to the following conclusion: GitOps supports the DevOps agenda in a particularly effective manner (where Git is the interface for operational actions). But that's only the very highest level definition. The following post lays out a brief … [Read more...]
Measure Software Delivery Performance with Four Key Metrics
This post has been adapted from Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. There are many frameworks and methodologies that aim to improve the way we build software products and services. We wanted to discover what works and what doesn’t in a scientific way, starting with a definition of what “good” means in this context. This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance. MEASURING SOFTWARE DELIVERY … [Read more...]
The 3 Real Risks Every Project Manager Should Focus On
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. It turns out that people are pretty terrible at assessing probabilities and risk. In my last book, A Seat at the Table, I cited several examples to make this point—examples that I love because even knowing the right answer I still can’t convince myself it is right. The first example had to do with the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal, in which the contestant is asked … [Read more...]
Quick Guide to DevOps for the Non-IT Business Leader
Adapted from War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz. What is DevOps 1) Small Teams of T-Shaped People DevOps is practiced in small teams, say five to nine people. Small teams can communicate among themselves face-to-face, thereby avoiding the overhead of passing around and perfecting documents. Each team is cross-functional, with skills in software development, testing, infrastructure engineering, operations, and … [Read more...]
Shaping Your Multispeed Future: Two Key Exercises from Mirco Hering
Adapted from DevOps for the Modern Enterprise by Mirco Hering To support you in adopting a multispeed future, here are two exercises for you to run in your organization. Both of them are highly related: the first is an analysis of your application portfolio and the second is the identification of a minimum viable cluster of application for which a capability uplift will provide real value. Application Portfolio Analysis If you are like most of my clients, you will have hundreds or thousands … [Read more...]
The Three Epiphanies of Mik Kersten
Adapted from Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework by Mik Kersten. My career has been dedicated to understanding and improving how large-scale software is built. I spent nearly two decades working on new programming languages and software development tools, and have had a chance to work with some of the best technologists in the world. But I have come to realize that, due to where we are in the Turning Point, technology … [Read more...]
Balanced Flowchart Exercise
By Dominica Degrandis The balanced flowchart exercise is a companion to Chapter 3.1 of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow. This exercise includes four useful metrics—all on one sheet—to help people see metric trends over time and understand how to become more predictable. TIME: 45–60 minutes PURPOSE: To discover what lead time, throughput, change failure rate (CFR), and probabilistic percentiles are by performing themby hand, and to learn what each can … [Read more...]
