XpOps: XP-based DevOps

XpOps ("XPO") rebases Gene Kim's Three Ways of DevOps on Kent Beck's Extreme Programming methods and adapts them to the purpose of Business Agility. This way it complies with the Zeroth Way of DevOps, flattening the cost of change curve to maintain the other three ways, and extending the XP practice of Merciless Refactoring to all the functions of a Value Stream.

DevOps began in XP, which pioneered the practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment before these things had separate names. But many modern DevOps practitioners have forgotten the fundamental learnings of XP, very much to their disadvantage.

XpOps also extends the First Way, to define the organization and its markets as an ecosystem, a network of mutual benefit between teams and systems.

It extends the Second Way by applying Data Science to Market Analytics to continuously adapt business priorities to changing market conditions.

And it extends the Third Way by making learning loops explicit via BDD and ecosystem design to accelerate the flow of learnings through the organization.

Why?

In leaving out XP and the Zeroth Way the Three Ways lose sight of the fundamental Ninth Principle of the original agile manifesto:

" Continuous attention to technical excellence?and good design enhances agility."

DevOps suffers the same woes as Scrum does unless it flattens the cost of change curve. Scrum left this out by intent, leaving organizations with a problem for agile to solve. This made it easier for organizations to take up back when agile was a new idea. Now though ... all panaceas become poison.

To maintain Kim's Phoenix Project ways further requires an emphasis on Mu Hin Shu learning ecosystems over Shu Ha Ri training hierarchies. Without this change in perspective, no matter how clear the DevOps guidelines, technical debt will simply find the next bottleneck at which to aggregate. As Goldratt's TOC tells us, there's always a bottleneck.

Who

As with the rest of XSCALE, XPO emphasizes Descaling. Because it focuses on the technical enablers for business agility, it connects Developers, Testers, Business Analysts, Designers, Architects, Managers, Operations and Change Leaders face to face through rotating councils of chapter representatives using the "Game Without Thrones".

This arrangement answers the longstanding DevOps question of whether and when to merge delivery and operations into a single team. As these two functions have different constraints, competencies and cadences, XPO uses circles and councils to answer the question through Leadership as a Service.

How

XPO coordinates the work of delivery and operations teams in a 3D Kanban on daily and weekly cadences. This minimises overhead for product, quality and portfolio management workflows. Small, autonomous squads aligned by small chapters and small councils continuously self-manage using mission-command, pairing, mobbing and standups instead of command-and-control and big-room meetings. This is Descaled Devops.

"Business & technology work?together daily."

XPO's weekly cadence synchronises ceremonies across teams and streams for feature reviews, chapter / council meetings, and team retros. Its daily cadence walks the wall to balance planned work against root cause analysis of analytics and operational incidents. Product and Portfolio councils include Ops chapter representatives working as peers face to face with business, design and delivery stakeholders to continuously adapt priorities to stream bottlenecks.

What

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery & Deployment (CI/CDD) enables multiple Feature delivery teams to release asynchronously without tripping over each others’ feet or siloing ownership of technical components. It enables XP's "Merciless Refactoring" to continuously pay down technical debt while strictly maintaining BDD acceptance criteria across the system.

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) makes sure ecosystem design and operational constraints are consistently maintained even when many independent and distributed teams continuously vary system behaviours. It dramatically reduces the cost of ownership of quality automation and enables design, delivery and operations functions to operate autonomously without losing alignment.

Git Workflows provides the most effective methods to coordinate the work products of delivery and operations teams . Proven on enormous scales in the development of the Linux kernel, in XSCALE these git workflows are tailored by treaty to empower teams and streams to share ownership of their codebases, data environments, infrastructure as code and pipeline as code across teams and streams.

Extreme Programming is a self-reinforcing toolkit for sustainable small-team engineering that applies continuous feedback to pay down technical debt and maximise effective collaboration. Critically important XP tools not found in Scrum include test-first delivery, promiscuous pairing, shared ownership via DVCS, merciless refactoring, sustainable pace, self-documenting code and “You Aren't Gonna Need It" (YAGNI).

The Camelot Model is a toolkit inspired by the Haudenosaunee Great Treaty Of Peace that minimises politics while speeding the flow of learnings within and between teams. It replaces Scrum roles with DRIs and Leadership as a Service to optimise the three "de-scaling metrics": meeting size, doer-decider distance, and feedback frequency. It maximises direct participation in decision-making across hierarchy through its rotating system of chapters and councils.

Learn More

XPO forms one of three core toolkits that, together, cover all the needs of an agile organization. The others are:

• XSCALE Product Agility (XPA)?which?aligns tech, design and business leaders, breadth-first, to form a product squad that continuously distils value stream drivers and constraints into a maximum-impact release plan.
• XSCALE Business Agility (XBA)?which generates self-directing portfolios of self-managing value streams that continuously identify and prioritise bottlenecks in business throughput and learning flow across the organization..

Treating these as toolkits rather than a framework serves the fundamental agile principle of YAGNI. This post outlines the purpose and benefits of the XPO toolkit – its Why, Who, How and What.

We just ran an XSCALE Podcast introducing XpOps and will announce availability of XPO Coach and Practitioner courses soon. To register your interest?in these, click here.