Stop Saying DevOps and Start Applying Continuous Delivery Principles
DevOps. You think you need it because the market is telling you, but the market is confused (and self-perpetuating). How is your organization implementing efforts in agile, Continuous Delivery, and now DevOps when they appear to be selling the same dream? Max starts with disambiguating DevOps and understanding our need as software engineers and practitioners. We still demand the same output: improved time to market through the incremental delivery of quality software. Next he shows how to conduct your own Value Stream Mapping exercise—a crucial tool ThoughtWorks uses to identify waste and uncover opportunities to speed up your time-to-market. Elise will describe methods for determining the performance of your delivery capability, whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise. And finally divided up into groups Max and Elise will examine your path to production where operations teams are rewarded for uptime and often are change averse, conflicting with your rapid development lifecycle. This is where most definitions of DevOps linger both Elise and Max share their lessons learned and tools of the trade that will help break down the barriers when putting applications live to customers.
Now a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks, Max Griffiths started as a shell scripter fulfilling his urge to automate everything. Since then, he’s been eating his way around the world working across multiple business sectors and it’s likely he’s worked at a company just like yours. Although the practice has changed names over time, Max has been working in a DevOps context for thirteen years, writing code and bringing teams closer together to help small, medium, and huge businesses improve their software delivery capability. Wearing many hats over the years has allowed him to talk to different parts of the business, translating business need into technical architecture and prove technical solutions are delivering relevant business value.
A senior developer at ThoughtWorks, Elise McCallum helps companies resolve both technical and organizational challenges. She has dabbled in languages ranging from Java to Puppet to Scheme. Elise has a deep interest in Ops and a strong passion for optimizing the development lifecycle and path to production to make delivering value as frictionless as possible. Previously, she played the role of iteration manager and business analyst to gain a better understanding of how business decisions are made and the influence they hold in the world of developer operations.