The DevOps Digest: 2022-03-25

This week, we cover Change Allergies, Utilization, The Data Behind DevOps, Team Topologies, Finishing Modernization and Tacos…

?Enjoy!

?Quote: Allergic to Change

“Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counterclockwise.”

Grace Hopper

15 Quotes From Women in Tech That Will Inspire You | by KaylaMatthews | Code Like A Girl

?Tweet: A fully utilized highway is a parking lot

Kyle on Twitter: "Listened to a great talk by @d_stepanovic today. His research really drives home how harmful over-utilization can be to productive throughput. "What do you call a fully utilized highway? A parking lot." #javascript" / Twitter

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Technical Article/Presentation: The Data Behind DevOps: Becoming a High Performer - DORA

The Data Behind DevOps - Becoming a High Performer - DORA | Devops Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 (itrevolution.com)

I like to constantly remind folks that the reason we "Do DevOps" is because the data shows that the capabilities under DevOps create the high performance characteristics for software organizations to thrive. Nicole Forsgren, PhD pioneered this research and her fantastic book Accelerate documents this research.

Amazon.com: Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations (Audible Audio Edition): Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, Nicole Forsgren, IT Revolution Press: Books

Note that this video is only available by subscribing to the DevOps Enterprise Summit Video Library. A free membership(10 videos/month) is available as well as individual and corporate memberships.

FYI: IT Revolution announced 2022 Conference Dates. I'm happy to say that the flagship event will be back in Las Vegas this year and in person! Additionally, registration and CFPs for the May Europe Event are now open!?

2022 Conference Dates

DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - Europe

10-12 May 2022?|??Registration Open?

?DevOps Enterprise Summit Virtual - US

August 2-4, 2022

?DevOps Enterprise Summit?US Flagship Event?

?The Cosmopolitan of?Las?Vegas

October 18-20, 2022

?Podcast: Mik + One / Manuel Pais / Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow

Manuel Pais Ep.42 - Project To Product

?I can highly recommend the podcast from Mik Kersten. For folks following DevOps, you'll note that Mik was one of the pioneers of DevOps, author of the fantastic book Project to Product and founder of Task Top that helps your teams implement Value Stream Management by making your key metrics visible and actionable.

?In this Podcast, Mik talks with Manual Pais, one of the others of Team Topologies. Manuel is recognized as a DevOps thought leader and is a significant contributor to our industry. If you haven't read Team Topologies, I can highly recommend. This book is THE BOOK for understanding how architecture, process and especially team structure affect flow in technology organizations and what to do to make it better. See here: Team Topologies Resources — Team Topologies

?In this episode, Mik revisits Team Topologies and digs into some of learnings that have occurred in this space since the books initial publication in 2019.?They also discuss the latest publication since the pandemic about remote interactions with teams: Remote Team Interactions Workbook (itrevolution.com)

Books: Kill It with Fire / 10: HOW TO FINISH

We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins. —Ellen Ullman

Amazon.com: Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) (Audible Audio Edition): Marianne Bellotti, Katie Koster, Random House Audio: Books

In this chapter, Marianne discusses finishing, but specifically how to define and measure success. Defining and measuring success is vitally important – otherwise, how do you know when you are done?

• Modernization work is a slog.?It is vital to maintain resilience during these long efforts and important to define success and measure progress and success along the way.

Finishing Approaches

• Approach 1: Success Criteria
• Define aligned success criteria that stakeholders agree on.
• Define your goal and then define measurements and success criteria that show you are headed in the right direction
• Examples of good success criteria(my emphasis): Outages reduced/avoided, Near Misses avoided, Transactions ported/moved, Automation coverage/tests, Lead Time to Deploy, Deploys/week
• Approach 2: Diagnosis-Policy-Actions
• Diagnosis: Define the problem.
• Policy: Set the boundaries and guidelines for solving the problem.?Good examples are: do no harm, no hard cutovers, incrementally port, rollback by default.
• Actions: Steps to take without violating policy.?Examples: All transaction ports will use a feature switch to direct traffic from old transaction to new transactions. Transactions will be soak tested on small client data-sets before larger rollouts.?Transaction failure rates will be actively monitored during rollout and an increase in failure will result in a rollback.
• Marking Time
• This is a way to record results over time to be able show accomplishments to yourself and the team to keep momentum going.
• A popular way to do this is bullet journaling. Daily, write down the 5 things you want to work on and check off those tasks with notes.
• When marking time like this, it evokes memory.?
• This highlights the distance between where you were and what you accomplished.?This also allows you to capture valuable lessons to leverage later.
• Postmortems on Success
• An alternative to postmortems on failures is to do postmortems on success
• This technique looks to document the success learnings for reading and leveraging later.
• Keep postmortems lighter-weight like retrospectives but documented with the philosophy of postmortems
• ?Beware of Signal Distortion: Working Groups vs Committees
• Postmortem writings can be misinterpreted and misapplied.?Actively look for scenarios where the writings are used incorrectly
• Example: War-room misapplication.
• Successful applications of war-rooms allow people across organizational boundaries to solve problems together.?They act like a Working Group, not a Committee.
• Working groups are staffed by the implementation layer of the organization.
• Committees are generally staffed by executives and formed to advise an audience external to the committee itself

?Something Else: Taco Chronicles

During COVID, everyone (including me) went on a Netflix binge...?One of the shows I picked up was the fantastic Taco Chronicles.?This show covers all the major types of tacos and more importantly the history and culture behind them.?Be warned: it makes you hungry!

Watch Taco Chronicles | Netflix Official Site

While watching the show, I joked: "I'm going to recreate this type of tour in Chicago."?My wife thought I was crazy: perhaps I am… :). Over the next few weeks and months I researched and toured great taco places all over the city of Chicago with friends and family.?It was a great and delicious experience, and also a way to break the monotony of COVID isolation.

You can see my list of places here: Taco Chronicles - Chicago, IL - Last Updated March 2022 - Yelp

Enjoy!!

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