Some Technical Debt is Self-Resolving
But don’t count on it. Fellow devopsy.kinsta.cloud contributor Bill Doerrfeld recently wrote, “Enterprises Face Growing Technical Debt,” a great article about trends in technical debt, and it got me thinking about some of the things that have been going on in the industry over the last few years. As I’ve mentioned before, the changes underlying […]
Enterprises Face Growing Technical Debt
Technologists are always espousing new, trendy development solutions. More robust frameworks, increased delivery, better integration. But rarely do these proponents consider the long-term side effects of introducing new technologies. As a result, technical debt is an all-to-common occurrence in most companies. Nearly a third of IT budgets are dedicated to addressing technical debt. Devoting so […]
Cattle, Not Kittens – Revisited
The early days of DevOps were filled with pronouncements that we needed to treat our servers as cattle, not pets (kittens). For a year or so, the refrain was everywhere. And we did. We detached servers from dedicated hardware, we made spin up and spin down so easy that we just replaced malfunctioning servers (which […]
Value Stream Management: Treat Your Pipeline as Your Most Important Product
When it comes to accelerating customer value, it’s dangerous to focus only on the development and delivery of a digital product. For many enterprises, most time is invested before a single line of code has been written. That explains the recent focus on value stream management (VSM)—it’s forcing us to think beyond Agile and DevOps […]
Documenting: Don’t Build Your Replacement’s Nightmare
Want to reduce headaches tomorrow? Document everything today About once a year I feel the need to remind you that you are creating technical debt. DevOps is good stuff, and most shops got over the “whatever a given project team decides” multiplication of services pretty quickly, but every line of DevOps code you write is […]
Communicating with Management About Technical Debt
We’re all familiar with the challenges of technical debt. While it’s often unavoidable–due to time constraints, resource considerations or simply a lack of good information–it still weighs on our minds and puts us on the defensive. It makes future changes that much more difficult. As it builds up, it generates that nagging sense of an […]
Prevent Technical Debt by Knowing When to Remove Feature Flags
As more organizations use feature flags and experiments, it’s critical to understand that some of these changes should exist for only a short or specific period of time, and then be removed from your codebase. Removing flags when appropriate avoids technical debt and complexity that can make your code fragile, harder to test and more […]
App Mobility Is the New Use Case
Selling increased investment in DevOps is not always easy. It takes time to implement, resource away from other projects and inevitably there is cash outlay. If not done carefully, it also appears to introduce chaos, something most of us in IT strive to avoid. But the benefits, at this point, are easy to document. Plenty […]
IT Enables Scale in Digital Transformation
Few corporate functions have seen their role disrupted as much as IT these last few years. The help desk days are long gone. As digital transformation accelerates, IT is becoming less about outright technology and more about creating capabilities that enable the overarching business strategy. As such, IT is the engine behind any company’s digital […]
Don’t Let Cultural Debt Bring Down Your Business
Businesses today are faced with myriad challenges to innovate and optimize. In doing so, we often need to make decisions that borrow against the future. This can come in a tangible form, such as taking money from investors to fund growth, or in more inconspicuous forms, such as making tradeoffs in technical decisions. When we […]
Adding Accountability with ‘You Build It, You Run It’
Let’s see if this scenario resonates with anyone: Your department, organization, company, etc. is beginning to embrace DevOps practices, which is, of course, an amazing step in the right direction! One of those key practices is the “You Build It, You Run It” (YBI/YRI) mantra that helps facilitate a higher level of quality and accountability. […]
Best DevOps Practices for 2017
Because the idea of DevOps is still so new, we’re continually having to hone what we view as best practices. At the start of the new year, many people make their own personal goals clear for the year (regardless of whether they intend to keep them), but we tend to head back to our work […]
DevOps Survey Says! State of DevOps, Reliance on Scripting and IT Automation
What our surveys told us about the state of DevOps, Reliance on Scripting and IT Automation DevOps Survey Results: Scripting & IT Automation A lot of IT Operations teams including application owners, configuration managers, middleware specialists and database administrators are managing infrastructure configuration change with manual processes, spreadsheets and scripts. They are spending a lot […]
Pay Down the Skills Debt Before the Technical Debt
When we talk about DevOps, we talk about addressing technical debt. We talk about how modern delivery processes and solutions might help you cure that technical debt of monolithic systems that are built on obsolete technologies, using antiquated development methodologies. But that jumps past the first critical step toward transformation, as technical debt is not […]
Only DevOps and Taxes
As software eats the world, it’s hard to have a conversation about anything that isn’t directly related to or driven by modern mobile, web and IoT applications. DevOps describes the modern approach to building these applications. But like all new movements, there is a cost. And while some of the costs associated with modern development […]
DevOps Leadership Series: Boston Common
DevOps is coming, DevOps is coming! You could hear the rallying cry around the city of Boston on September 15th and 16th. This is when the DevOps Leadership Series crew headed up north to attend DevOps Days Boston. We first caught up with Beno Chapman (@BenoChapman), release engineering leader at Constant Contact. Beno shared, […]
The Cost to DevOps: 27 Mufflers
Imagine Imagine that you are designing the 2016 Range Rover line of sport utility vehicles. Like all gas powered vehicles, each one needs an exhaust muffler. Range Rover likely has narrowed in on a preferred provider of mufflers. But imagine what would happen if the designers and factory line workers could pick from any one […]
DevOps and Bi-Modal IT
Can a business have two competing approaches to delivery and operations of their information infrastructure and be successful? If you follow Gartner recommendations, it would seem that bi-modal IT is the way to go. Bi-modal IT has been explained many different ways, but, ultimately, comes down a failure in leadership; allowing a subset of IT […]
DevOps and Organizational Debt
I recently published a blog on the Perficient Digital Transformation blog entitled “Is Cloud & DevOps Factored Into Your Digital Transformation?” In that blog I discuss the concept of organizational debt and its impact on your DevOps adoption. Here’s what I had to say in that blog: If technical debt addresses too little investment in […]
Q&A: Gene Kim on the pain of accruing technical debt
Last week, we ran the story Paying Down Technical Debt. This week, we’re discussing that very topic with Gene Kim (@realgenekim). As a follower of DevOps trends, you probably are already aware of his most recent book project, The DevOps Cookbook, and most certainly his previous works, The Visible Ops Handbook and The Phoenix Project: […]
Paying Down Technical Debt
When watching IT shops over the years it seems some, despite trying to cram two weeks worth of work into six days a week, never seem to move very far forward. And yet other teams seem to make tremendous strides in productivity and outcomes despite not working as many hours as the poorer performing organizations. […]
Top 3 must-haves in Dev/Ops project handoffs, Part one
There isn’t much that makes IT operations happier than receiving that brand new application neatly boxed, wrapped, tied with a bow, and outfitted with exhaustive instructions for every what-if, what-then, and what now scenario. Before you give the gift that keeps on giving in all the wrong ways, take these top three must-haves in developer […]