5 Mistakes to Avoid When Chasing DevOps Transformation
In less than a decade, DevOps has become a buzzword of the IT industry, and enterprises are already reaping its benefits. But the implementation part still remains a question for many firms, considering the key mistakes that many organizations report in their very approach to DevOps. Most firms are also unsure about what outcomes they […]
Focusing on the True DevOps North Star: Continuous Improvement
When we look beyond the fundamentals of tearing down silos and establishing greater collaboration, communication and transparency, DevOps is a label assigned to a framework of best practices and technologies that organizations leverage to deliver systems faster, more efficiently and without sacrificing quality. The best practice within that framework is continuous improvement, which provides stakeholders […]
The Top 5 Ways DevOps Fails – and How to Prevent Them
The working hypothesis for a Gartner report on how to avoid failure with your DevOps effort is that, unless the trajectory changes, “Through 2023, 90 [percent] of DevOps initiatives will fail to fully meet expectations.” The reason? You could boil it down to management not fully understanding DevOps tenets and nuances—things such as targeting business […]
DevOps and Systems Thinking: The Farmer, His Tractor and Olive Garden
As a DevOps and Agile consultant, I work with many technology leaders who see DevOps as this big tangled mess of which they are trying to make sense. When I talk to them, I have to teach them to lead in a systems-thinking manner, a key tenet of DevOps. Making sense of systems thinking is […]
Keys to Improving Enterprise DevOps Practices
As enterprises move to adopt DevOps practices, there is a desire to measure where teams are on their journey. This sometimes leads to the development of maturity models used to assess teams’ levels and progress. While I am not going to pass judgment on what might be useful for certain organizations, I believe that the […]
Testing What’s Important: Keep Growing Your Test Base
In most human endeavors that take a stretch of time to complete, the idea is latched onto and people become excited about being involved. It doesn’t matter if it is building a skyscraper, inventorying a massive warehouse or even going to war. People are intrigued by the possibilities and want to get started doing the […]
Strategies to Build Trust in DevOps
I’ve been a member of the DevOps community a long time (literally since before it was ever even called “DevOps”). I was a pre-publication reviewer for both “The Phoenix Project” and the recently published “The DevOps Handbook,” and I’m always interested in seeing the outcomes successes software teams have and the failures they overcome, including […]
What the Auto Industry Can Teach IT Development
The latest and greatest advances in technology often draw the spotlight, but the truly great changes in business aren’t driven by technology alone. They’re enabled by a change in culture that’s supported and accelerated by technology. Consider the assembly line in the auto industry. Automation, specialized tooling and robotics have provided a boost to quality […]
Embedding Predictive Analytics
For an enterprise with a deep DevOps maturity model, the initial “wow” factor of automation has worn off. At this point, the sexier concepts involve proving continuous improvement. As an example, our first baseline of metrics might have taken the pre-DevOps timings of a typical build and deployment of a given application. We can measure […]
Continuous Improvement: The Key DevOps Distinguisher
DevOps has become a well-accepted and growing component for delivery success, shown in the State of DevOps Report among other respected publications. But even as it becomes more ubiquitous, it’s naive to think every organization will cease having delivery concerns. Implementations will differ widely, and adherence is essentially self-reported. So what is it, then, that […]
5 Things DevOps is Not
For those who have been embracing and championing DevOps for years, the growing popularity of DevOps is as exciting as landing your first job out of college! Okay, maybe not that exciting, but still really cool. More and more companies of all sizes are embracing DevOps by including the adoption of DevOps practices directly into […]
All Systems Fail*
Vince Lombardi once said, “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” But in today’s world of high velocity development and release practices, it’s also about how fast you can get up. Today, we are seeing more news about sites from major online retailers and service providers like HP, Target, PayPal […]