The value is in the learning

Devops is the new buzz word, and management and business have now adopted practises of mutual collaboration between Dev and Ops, with of course at the end of the rainbow waiting the golden promise of continuous delivery of software. The article The convergence of devops gives a nice overview of the history of Devops.

Because I have a background in both QA and software development, I am working at customers of Hippo in a Devops role. This week I joined a one day conference in Amsterdam about Devops to find out what's the current state of affairs.

Most speakers addressed Devops from a cultural and collaboration perspective. For instance Matthew Skelton spoke about the practises of Run Book or operational manuals which can be a starting point of conversations between Ops and Dev teams. From personal experience I learned that the best collaboration tool is actually ... Skype! So many deployment we did with Skype sessions. Not even mention the debug sessions to solve production problems. It was funny to see one of the conference attendees having a Skype session open during the conference ... maybe solving a production issue ?

What is the gain of Devops for a software developer ?

One of the speakers told that he heard a developer saying "I just want to write code". In his opinion that was not acceptable. But I can understand the remark of the developer. Developers are usually hired for coding. It may be quite a shock if that implies that you have to assure that the code runs on a web server with two million page requests. And that you have to do the testing and help the Ops people in long nightly Skype sessions during deployments. Big change.

This is an important issue - in my opinion - when an organization tries to adopt Devops. Not only business should profit from it, but everyone involved should see the gains.

Actually many of the questions in the conference were actually about a single question. How to inspire the people do jump out of their silos and collaborate? There are no simple answers to this question. The general feeling I got from the conference is that everybody is struggling. We are struggling with something that is bigger than us.

There is change in the air.

So, let's talk about change. I saw two webcasts from Eric Ries which gave me new insights, energy and inspiration.

Eric interviewed the founder of Extreme Programming, Kent Beck. Remarkably, Kent Beck admitted having difficulty to adapt to the Facebook culture of "move fast, break things". He had to learn to be bald again and to build things that have impact. And during the conversation Kent gave an answer about this pounding question raised in the conference. It is so incredibly cool to release yourself your code to millions of users.

Developers ! That is the gain of Devops ! Releasing stuff to millions of people. Funny that nobody in the conference came with this answer ...

Also Kent explained that every working method or practise only make sense in a particular context. For example the Facebook culture would not make sense in Apple. This importance of context was expressed very well by Niek Bartholomeus at the Devops conference. He talked about how devops in mature IT organization is different than in a start-up. Good point.

But what when our environment is changing? Most changes are not coming from ourselves, but from a rapid changing world. For example read this article and think about it.

Actually what I learned - and I have to repeat this lesson again and again to myself - that there are no definitive answers. The only thing we can do is learn every day. Because the value is in the learning and not in the result.

This remarkable statement was done by Eric Ries in the second webcast I saw this weekend. This talk was about how to work in an environment with extreme uncertainty. Innovative start-ups. It is impossible to summarize this talk, you really have to watch it. Mind blowing. I was surprised by the attitude of testing and experimenting and learn from experience. Eric gave an example of a small mobile company. Their whole production process was basically designed as weekly experiments. The deploy on Friday, and they test the new experiments with their own mobiles in the weekend at home. On Monday they evaluated and started new experiments for the coming week. No backlog, no product owner, no plans. Only experiments and tests. Cool.

Now I have the feeling that in Europe - with our social security and social laws, holidays and mature industry - we are arriving at a point that we really have to switch our chip.

Adapt, learn and experiment !

Links

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The value is in the learning