DevOptics - Deliver business value from DevOps investment

So you got sold Digital Transformation from your consultants as a means of winning in the market.  

While your engineering organization sold DevOps/continuous delivery as a panacea for fixing the slow rate of feature delivery and consequently achieving this Digital Transformation to you. “You know, our team could operate like Netflix, Etsy or perhaps Amazon. All we need to do is push things fast and not worry about breaking things in production, iterate, learn, kaizen...”. Sound familiar?

Your first lesson after cutting a cheque for this transformation is that DevOps is cultural and no one tool can bring “DevOps” in your org and the second lesson is “Boy you do need all the tools.”

Months into the cultural transformation, you will be in the throes of answering the question “Is this continuous delivery thing working?” The answer from a down in the trenches engineer is going to be “We don’t quite know...it seems like it.” If you scratch the surface, you will find a hairy mess of individual “pizza” size teams (“we are mimicking Amazon after all”) delivering components or microservices that feed these microservices into other teams that build their own microservice that feeds that microservice into another team that builds the final application. It is turtles all the way down. If you ask your engineering teams where the bits (finished products) are on the route to production - you are not going to get an answer. What’s happened, behind the scenes, is that  your VP of engineering pulled up a JIRA dashboard, found that it isn’t quite updated and then ran around talking to the various team managers who goad their engineers to update their ticket to indicate status. Complete baloney, but the reality nevertheless.

(source)

Recently, I read “The Goal” and think that a manufacturing plant is the right metaphor for software delivery pipelines. I hear that software is inherently more complex than a manufacturing plant but  that reason is cop-out from tackling the hard issues of industrialising software delivery. On a personal note, my father used to head engineering for five copper wire manufacturing plants around the world. He mentioned to me that of all the teams that worked for him, IT or software was the only one that couldn’t tell him when work could get done and as I excitedly laid out things in the Phoenix Project and The Goal - his dry comment was that “It is just the beginning of the learning.” I was aghast. This making-sh*t-up-on-the-fly in software delivery has to stop.

Good news is, the lessons learned in manufacturing apply to software manufacturing. Lean manufacturing concepts like Value Stream Mapping apply to software, and the proof is that software industry has made stars out of people evangelizing these concepts. However, in true stone age style, you need this highly paid star turned consultant to come in and look at your software delivery pipelines. The pipeline sits on a wiki and goes to die.

What we need is an industrial revolution in software delivery (sounds retrograde but that’s where the industry is truly at). Industrialization necessitates taking the art of software delivery and making it into a hard science - measurable and actionable.

CloudBees DevOptics is the first step to industrializing this delivery pipeline. CloudBees brings value stream pipelines and makes them the live application delivery dashboard within an organization. That VP of engineering we talked about earlier, can dive into each of his team’s delivery pipeline or zoom out to the interweb of connected teams to see exactly where the bits are enroute to production. CloudBees DevOptics ties popular tools like JIRA, Jenkins and GitHub, Bitbucket (GitLab coming soon) to perform root cause analysis to answer specific issues related to issues in the pipeline.

(pic: Unified Release Phase is the choke point for the team)

CloudBees DevOptics  is the first and necessary step of creating value streams and making them live so that first responders in software delivery pipelines know where the patient is at, in order to send medical responders to intercept. There are a number of exciting updates coming in the upcoming quarters that help medical responders detect various vitals on this patient - stay tuned.

CloudBees is on a mission to industrialise software delivery and I invite you to take the first steps with us.