Agile + DevOps East 2021 - Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy Environment with the Kanban Method | TechWell

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Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy Environment with the Kanban Method

Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards achieving DevOps cost savings and efficiencies—without turning your organization upside down, and even if you don’t have a massive budget. Through a case study involving a criminal justice system for a US government agency, we will examine how the Kanban method helps us identify and remove the barriers that prevent us from implementing DevOps automation for legacy systems. Just as importantly, Kanban provides the means to measure the efficacy of our efforts, prompting us to course-correct when necessary. Both technology-related and human-related concerns will be addressed. We will review some interesting examples using the Microsoft technology stack. The end result is better quality and collaboration and faster delivery of value to our stakeholders. Perhaps it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.

Craeg-Strong
Ariel Partners

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square. He is currently teaching public Kanban classes and coaching teams to adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices in the NYC area. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies. Mr. Strong leverages his experience as a hands-on software architect, trainer and agile coach to help remove the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new technologies-- such as cloud. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major FBI Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation.