What Leaders Need to Know About Devops

Leader: Patrick Debois, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

It has been an interesting ride since the term devops was first coined in 2009. Initially, people dismissed the idea, calling it anything from transient to a blatant scam. Now many believe devops is here to stay and that it makes a significant contribution to a company's competitve edge.

The lead time between idea conception and production remains high in many organizations, despite various project management methodologies and the push towards operational excellence. Internal fights emerge as Development and Operations strive towards conflicting goals: Agile shortens software delivery time by introducing a greater number of smaller changes; ITIL increases stability by minimizing changes. How can an organization overcome this internal conflict? With devops.

Instead of optimizing an individual part of the delivery process, devops looks to optimize the whole process. In this workshop, you'll come to understand the whys and hows of increasing collaboration between the separate organizational silos. You'll learn:

• The history and drivers that have pushed forward the notion of devops
• The translation of agile concepts within the traditional ITIL world
• Where devops fits with existing concepts like Scrum, Kanban, ALM
• The role of tools such as virtualization, infrastructure as code, and monitoring
• How to introduce devops within existing/new environments
• The similarities with the open source model and opening knowledge
• What the Agile community can learn from devops to foster future ideas

You'll discover that devops is not about tools, but about mindset and trust. Like TDD and continuous integration for Agile, new technologies such as infrastructure as code, virtualization, monitoring and deployment can play a crucial role in supporting this collaboration. And you'll come to understand how exploiting the "symmetry of ignorance" and moving beyond the traditional boundaries inside organizations will make it possible to collaborate more frequently to reach business goals.