Seems like I’ve been suffering from frequency illusion (aka blue car syndrome) recently. I’d been mulling over the fact that a majority of clients I serve don’t invest wisely in DevOps or simply don’t know how to proceed. A recent one, for example, has been crafting a DevOps strategy for over a year with nothing to show for it. Sadly, the DevOps initiative and group is considered separate from all the teams doing agile. Interestingly, I suddenly started seeing lots of data supporting my belief — most likely, I was primed to see it crop up everywhere.
Forrester’s 2014 report, “How Can You Scale Your Agile Adoption?” and Cloudbees’, “Four Quadrants of DevOps Maturity” reinforce the notion that the late stages of the software development cycle are usually given the short shrift.
We know that software development entails more than just development. To keep the discussion simple, software development can be thought of a sequence of activities (and associated information and work product flows) encompassing understanding customer and stakeholder needs, planning, designing the offering, coding, building, integrating, testing, releasing/promoting, deploying, operating, and getting feedback for the next cycle.
While a decent percentage of companies are focusing their agile efforts on the pre-integration stages, less than 15% have introduced agile principles, techniques, and practices in the integration and post-integration steps. So, while companies get better at developing software they still are gated and held back by unnecessary delays in the later stages of the life-cycle.
As an aside, I’m not considering funding, sequencing of work across the stakeholders, and requirements being pushed to teams without regard to their capacity and ability to deliver here — areas that still need tremendous work in most organizations. Also, SAFe has rightly emphasized attending to the team structures but often overlooked in agile transformations are the facts that teams don’t have all the skills needed, team membership is unstable due to shortage of necessary skills, there is a lack of focus on minimizing dependencies (highlighting dependencies is not the same as minimizing them), and the business and teams aren’t often aligned.
This issue of lack of agility, post-coding manifests itself in a few major ways:
- Teams struggle with lack of environments for developing, integrating, and testing.
- Extreme risk aversion in the second half of the cycle at times often precludes teams from promoting their own code — they then face significant challenges in testing their work in a timely manner.
- Deploying to higher environments can at times be a cumbersome, bureaucratic process — infrequent promotions and deployments delay defect discovery and slow down feedback. Consequently, feedback cycles of 2 weeks or less in development balloon to weeks and even months in the latter stages.
- In a handful of cases, development organizations start using tools (whether open source or not) that Operations does not have the skill or personnel to support.
Quite a few companies treat DevOps and Operations as separate from development. Most don’t treat DevOps as a function but as a team. DevOps teams with managers are just another silo and a significant number of people think they do DevOps just because they have a team called DevOps. Even worse, I’ve far too often seen QA, Automation, and Development as separate groups with their own goals and agendas. Throw in the fact that different vendors (often competing for additional business) often perform each of these activities and you just make the situation worse.
So, here are a few things to think about:
- How can we change the mindset of the folks doing and managing the second half of the activities to be more agile?
- How can we create a true DevOps function, where the business, development teams, and operation staff collaborate from the start? How do we break down the boundaries between these roles?
- How can we encourage larger organizations to start their agile journey with aligning on a DevOps strategy quickly and improving the DevOps function to immediately address the huge delays and waste?
- How can we make it easy for developers to request and get environments to build and test against?
- How can we help companies recognize that a repeatable infrastructure and application deployment process is extremely necessary?
We would love to continue the discussion and talk about our experience in making Agile work for DevOps. Please reach out to us (Jon at 702-389-8160 or Alex at 949-667-1008), or if in Las Vegas, attend a DevOps centric meetup (more information at http://hatech.io/community.html#meetups).
