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Death to the DevOps team! How to avoid another silo
Matthew Skelton, Skelton Thatcher Consulting
Agile Cambridge 2014,
Friday 3rdOctober 2014, Cambridge, UK
#agilecam

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DevOps
‘DevOps’

3.
Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

4.
Matthew Skelton
•Building & operating commercial software systems since 1998
•Cybernetics + Neuroscience + Music
•control engineering
•psychology
•‘network’ and group interactions
@matthewpskelton

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Skelton Thatcher
Introduction and Services Overview

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‘Cloud’ changes the way we mustdesign, deliver, and operateour software systems

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Changes for ‘cloud’

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DevOps
‘DevOps’

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Not DevOps:
“Automation”
“Build & Release”
“Infrastructure Development”
“System Administration”

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DevOps
“Highly effective, daily collaboration between software developers and IT operations people to produce relevant, working systems” *
*also QA/Testing, IT Service Desk, Programme Management, Commercial, Marketing, etc.

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Sectors
•Tourism
•Betting
•Travel booking
•Legal software
•Healthcare
•Financial data & reporting
•Government agencies
•Foreign Exchange

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Organisations
1.Financial data
2.Legal software
3.Travel booking

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Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

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Team Topologies

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http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies

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HT: @EricMinick, IBM

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Organisations
1.Financial data
2.Legal software
3.Travel booking

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1. Financial data
Goal: shorter Lead Time
No ‘DevOps’ team 
Challenge: define the purpose of the new team(s)
(‘naming things is hard’)

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1. Financial data
?

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1. Financial data
Are the main challenges technical?
(Clue: probably not)

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1. Financial data
Evolve the team(s) over 2 years
Clarity of purpose
Spread culture

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2. Legal software
Genuine ‘no Ops’
Challenge: avoid a ‘tooling takeover’

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2. Legal software
?
?

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2. Legal software
Grow an Operations capability
Use and train the Support team
‘SRE’ or ‘Web Operations’

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3. Travel booking
Service Desk silo
Challenge: slow or limited feedback from Production

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3. Travel booking
?
?

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3. Travel booking
Collaboration with shared tools
Visualise and broadcast
Retain Ops discipline

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Team topology determines recruitment needs

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Team Topologies
http://bit.ly/DevOpsTopologies
https://github.com/ SkeltonThatcher/DevOpsTopologies

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https://twitter.com/EricMinick/status/517335119330172930

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There is no ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for any one organisation

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Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

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Flow Exercises

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Experience DevOps
A hands-on workshop for DevOps culture
experiencedevops.org

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@jamesbetteley
@johnC_bristol

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2 Dev teams, 1 Ops team 
Ops team did ‘stop the line’ 

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2x throughput! 
Service Teams 

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Modelling teams & constraints
Single team
Two Dev teams, one Ops team
Two service teams (Dev + Ops)
Provisioning delays
Backlog item prioritisation

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“… organising the North of England’s largest ball flow game”

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Explore topology effectiveness with different constraints
Drive team topology with metrics from flow exercises!

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Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

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Choosing Tools

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http://rashidkpc.github.io/Kibana/images/screenshots/searchss.png

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“How does [the use of] this tool help people to collaborate*?”
* Work together, at the same keyboard/screen

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‘How to choose tools for DevOps and Continuous Delivery’
http://bit.ly/ChooseDevOpsTools
‘DZoneguide to Continuous Delivery 2014’
http://bit.ly/DZoneCDreport

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How to choose tools for DevOps
Value collaboration aspects
Avoid a learning mountain: evolve tooling
Avoid Production-only tools
Consider Conway’s Law
(this list is incomplete!)

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Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

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Recruitment

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Don’t hire ‘DevOps’

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Recruitment suggestions
Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)
Web Operations (‘WebOps’?)
SysAdmin+ Git + TDD (?)

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Recruitment suggestions
Diplomacy
Facilitating
Evangelising
Mentor
Deep specialism in SAN fabrics

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Yes, we still need operations
Metrics
Layer 2 / 3 subtleties
Rapid diagnosis
Fault heuristics
Incident response experience
‘Battle-scars’

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Recruiting for DevOps
Don’t hire ‘DevOps’
Don’t advertise for ‘DevOps Engineer’
Use SRE / WebOps/ TDD
Don’t forget Operations skills!

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Team topologies
Flow exercises
Choosing tools
Recruitment
Empathy Snap

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Empathy Snap

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Empathy Snap
http://bit.ly/EmpathySnap

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Recapitulation

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How to avoid another silo

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Team topologies
There is no ‘right’ topology
Many ‘wrong’ topologies for one organisation
Consider skills, core business, SLAs, …
Evolve the topology over time (2 years)
Communicate the purpose

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Flow exercises
Adapt to include IT Ops people
Learning through physical interaction
Model and measure flow
Flow exercises help choose a team topology

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Other things
Consider the collaboration value in all tools
Shared tools for shared responsibilities
Don’t hire ‘DevOps’
Encourage empathy

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We did not really mention:
Funding: CapExvs OpEx
Bonuses & financial rewards / penalties
Building a culture
Conway’s Law
…

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Death to the ‘DevOps’ teamLong live the DevOps team

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Further reading
Build Quality In
buildqualityin.com
Forewords by Dave Farley and Patrick Debois
Discount for #AgileCam!
https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin/c/ AgileCam2014
http://bit.ly/BQI-AgileCam2014
Valid until 10th October 2014

65.
Further reading
@annashipman–DevOps @ GDS (Build Quality In)
http://markosrendell.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/calling-devops-teams-an- antipattern-is-an-antipattern/
http://www.slideshare.net/Urbancode/building-a-devops-team-that-isnt-evil/15http://seroter.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/8-characteristics-of-our-devops- organization-2/ http://devops.com/blogs/buzzword-abuse-anatomy-devops-engineer/
Allan Kelly on Conway’s Law: https://vimeo.com/channels/londoncd/85378217

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Thank you!
http://skeltonthatcher.com/
enquiries@skeltonthatcher.com
@SkeltonThatcher
+44 (0)20 8242 4103