Three Practices for Effective DevOps Adoption

A couple of years ago, Endava realized that the difficulties in DevOps adoption are never the automation technology but rather the ways-of-working, which require a much more fundamental change in people's behavior and culture. Over time we found that there are three practices that have been repeatedly useful in helping successful DevOps adoption.

The practices are (real) agile development, incubator teams and pipelines. In this talk, Eoin will briefly review all three, discuss why they facilitate successful DevOps adoption and talk in a bit more depth about incubator teams, which may be less familiar to attendees than the other two.

Transcript

1. GOTOpia SEPTEMBER 2020 EOIN WOODS Three Practices for Effective DevOps Adoption
2. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 2 Agenda 1. INTRODUCTIONS 2. RECAP THE MEANING OF “DEVOPS” 3. SOME COMMON DEVOPS ADOPTION PROBLEMS 4. THREE PRACTICES FOR DEVOPS ADOPTION 5. CONCLUSIONS
3. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 Dr Eoin Woods – “Owen” CTO at Endava since 2015 • 1990 – 2003: Product companies in UK & US • 2003 – 2014: Capital Markets companies Leading the “DevOps at Endava” programme Author, speaker, community guy
4. CLOSE TO CLIENT Denmark Germany Netherlands United Kingdom United States NEARSHORE DELIVERY European Union: Romania and Bulgaria Central European: North Macedonia, Moldova, and Serbia Latin America: Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela 6,468 AS OF MAR 31, 2020 GLOBAL EMPLOYEES AS OF MAR 31, 2020 36 OFFICES // 31 CITIES // 15 COUNTRIES Banking & Financial Services Payments Insurance Investment Management Telco & Media Mobility Healthtech Retail & CPG FOCUSED INDUSTRY EXPERTISE
5. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 2 Reminder: what is “DevOps”? 5
6. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 DEVOPS AGILITY ► MOVING FASTER MOVING FASTER ► REGULAR CHANGE REGULAR CHANGE ► CONTAINERS & SERVICES CONTAINERS AND SERVICES ► OPERATIONAL COMPLEXITY Why DevOps? Why Now?
7. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 Defining DevOps at Endava CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS, DELIVERING AND OPERATING SOFTWARE AS A VISIBLE, MEASURABLE FLOW OF VALUE IN A CONTINUOUS AND SUSTAINABLE WAY (NOT PRIMARILY ABOUT AUTOMATION – WE CALL THAT “CONTINOUS DELIVERY”)
8. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 CULTURE FOCUS ON PEOPLE EMBRACE EXPERIMENTATION SHARING OPEN INFORMATION SHARING COLLABORATION & COMMUNICATION AUTOMATION CONTINUOUS DELIVERY INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE MEASUREMENT MEASURE EVERYTHING SHOW THE IMPROVEMENT LEAN PRODUCE VALUE FOR END USER SMALL BATCH SIZES C A L M S – A REMINDER
9. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 3 Common Problems in DevOps Adoption 9
10. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 Some Difficulties with DevOps Adoption
11. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 Some Difficulties with DevOps Adoption Expectations Culture Tools Focus Silos Organisational Environment
12. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 4 Three Practices for DevOps Adoption 12
13. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 13 Technical teams providing transitional expertise and transferring knowledge Enabler Teams Help to build and evolve critical new infrastructure and coach & lead other teams Agile Working Functional agile teams with effective product owners Enables the reliable flow of useful change, crucial for DevOps working Automated, validating, single-route to production for all code changes Pipelines Technical artefact shared between Dev and Ops, contributes to reliability, and efficiency.
14. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 14 AGILE WORKING
15. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 15 AGILE WORKING Empowered, informed, decisive, product owner Empowered, cross-functional team High quality, maintained, prioritised, backlog Consistent, sufficient, software quality DevOps needs a regular, sustainable, predictable flow of valuable changes This requires …
16. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 16 PIPELINES BUILD UNIT TEST PACKAGE TEST DEPLOY INTEGRATION TEST NON-FUNCTIONAL TEST ACCEPTANCE TEST DEPLOY STABILITY & CONFIDENCE
17. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 17 PIPELINES STABILITY & CONFIDENCE STABILITY & CONFIDENCE
18. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 18 PIPELINES STABILITY & CONFIDENCE Single automated path from commit to production => Reliability, repeatability, consistency & efficiency Key collaboration point: not just technical benefit Visible manifestation of your path-to-production Increases confidence stage by stage => Includes manual checkpoints where needed
19. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 ENABLER TEAMS DevOps implementation is difficult … and it’s never a technology problem (really) There is a lot to learn … and a lot of culture to instil … and a lot of behaviour to encourage Enabler Teams are one way we’ve found to help with this
20. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 20 ENABLER TEAMS Enabler teams work as peer-team within the overall engineering team to: • Develop culture by example • Bring and transfer technical knowledge • Build useful shared things that make everyone more productive
21. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 21 SOME ENABLER TEAM MODELS Nurturing Expert team working with all scrum teams to foster practice & transfer knowledge. Once DevOps ways of working embedded, dissolve into teams or move on Technical expertise team goaled with bounded task to unblock transformation (e.g. “fix the tests”) Fixing Form the team, fix the problem, evangelize approach, transfer knowledge, dissolve Team that demonstrates DevOps working by delivering and owning an enabling shared source “product” (pipeline, deployment platform, …) Building Long standing team, membership rotating through scrum teams
22. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 22 ENABLER TEAMS TYPICALLY DISSOLVE PROGRAM LIFETIME
23. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 5 Conclusion 23
24. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 The DevOps Era is Here • Cross-Functional Teams • Delivering and Operating • Flow of Value • Continuous and Sustainable DevOps
25. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 DevOps Adoption is Complex Expectations Culture Tools Focus Silos Organisational Environment
26. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 Some Practices to Consider • Get agile working first • Look for evidence of outputs not ceremonies • Small regular deliveries provide DevOps inputs Agile Working Pipelines • Pipelines provide reliability, efficiency, consistency, … • Shared tools lead to collaboration (perhaps surprisingly) • Useful for non-technical stakeholders too once visualised Enabler Teams • A lot to learn for any team • Develop culture, transfer knowledge, build useful things • Dissolve or rotate staff frequently
27. GOTOpia 2020 // THREE DEVOPS PRACTICES // © COPYRIGHT 2020 EOIN WOODS // 20200915.1 For Your DevOps Journey STAKEHOLDERS ENVIRONMENT DEVOPS ADOPTION CHALLENGES ADOPTION PRACTICES CULTURE SHARING AUTOMATION MEASUREMENT LEAN