The document discusses the evolving landscape of software development, emphasizing the need for organizations to adopt 'cloud native' practices to remain competitive in an era of transient advantage. It advocates for a shift towards user-centric, small batch methodologies that enhance agility and innovation while reducing risks associated with traditional software development. Businesses are encouraged to embrace DevOps principles and cultural changes to facilitate faster deployment and better alignment with customer needs.

1. IIA3: Better ways of developing
software - or coding like a unicorn
Michael Coté | @cote

2. Better ways of developing software
or coding like a unicorn
@cote
July 2016
2 Slides: http://cote.io/unicorn-coding/

3. • @cote – Director, Marketing at
Pivotal
• Former industry analyst at 451
Research and RedMonk
• Corporate strategy and M&A at
Dell
• Former software developer
• More: cote.io/podcasts,
http://cote.io, cote@pivotal.io, The
Register DevOps column.
Hello!
3

4. 4
Meanwhile, in business-land …

5. 5
“Silicon Valley is
coming …
we are going to
work hard to make
our services as
seamless and
competitive as
theirs.”
-Jamie Dimon, CEO@JPMC,
2015 letter to shareholders

6. “If advantages eventually disappear, it
only makes sense to have a process
for filling your pipeline with new ones.
This in turn means that rather than
being an on-again, off-again
mishmash of projects, your innovation
process needs to be carefully
orchestrated.”
- Prof. Rita McGrath, “Transient Advantage,” HBR, June 2013
“Cloud Native” is IT’s answer to transient advantage
6
Since 2000,
52% of the F500
are no longer on
the list
Sources: “Transient Advantage,” above; F500 figure from 2014 Constellation Research Summary, R. “Ray” Wang, Feb. 2014.

7. Cloud Native Business Theory
(1.) In an era of transient advantage, the
inherit agility of software is one of the best
strategic tools.
(2.) However, software in large organizations
does not currently “work like that.”
(3.) The fix is changing how we think of the
process of software, supported by cloud
native technologies and practices.
7

8. 8

9. It’s not much of an IT department, but I’m
sorta attached to it …
9

10. Source: Gartner press release, Aug 2015; “The Agile Advantage,” MeriTalk/Accenture, May 2015; Cutter Consortium, July 2015.
IT is failing to meet the transient advantage needs
of the business
What is your IT
organization's role
in business
innovation?75% of application
development
supporting digital
business will be
built not bought by
2020
10

11. A user-centric, small batch approach creates a
software defined business
11 Source: Pivotal Labs, March 2016. See also “Agile Transformation in the Age of the 3rd Platform,” Al Hilwa , IDC, Feb 2016 (unpublished)
Exploration Discovery
Feedback Loop

12. Continuous Delivery
Release once every 6 months
More bugs in production
Release early and often
Higher quality code
DevOps
Not my problem
Separate tools, varied incentives,
opaque process
Shared responsibility
Common incentives, tools, process,
and culture
Microservices
Tightly coupled components
Slow deployment cycles waiting on
integrated tests teams
Loosely coupled components
Automated deploy without waiting on
individual components
Platform, Standard Practices and Tools, Cloud Native Culture
TraditionalITCloudNative

13. The Process
13

14. “We spent a lot of time talking about technology, but
technology really isn't the meat of the conversation that
needs to occur.” Matt Curry, Allstate
14
Source: Matt Curry quote from Feb 2016 TheNewStack interview; “Agile Transformation in the Age of the 3rd Platform,” Al Hilwa ,
IDC, March 2016.

15. Benchmark your agile behaviors, plan catching up as
needed
Source: “Town Hall: Agile in the Enterprise,” Mike West, Nathan Wilson, Thomas Murphy, Dec 2015, Gartner AADI US conference.15

16. Discovering and delivering the
software your customer actually
wants
• Most organizations
emphasize building to plan
• In reality, the “plan”
constantly evolves
• Learning organizations
explore and experiment
How most
businesses
think they’re
doing
How smart
businesses
know they’re
doing
16

17. Use small batch thinking at all levels
• Weekly, even daily
deploys to production
• Deploy to production
each time, avoid
waterscrumfall
• Relies on:
- Product approach
- Small batch oriented
pipeline and process
- Cloud native automation
Inception
Hypothesize
Validate
w/real use(r)s
Did it work?
Sources: “Good Software is a Series of Little Failures,” Coté, April 2016; The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, 2011. The Lean Enterprise, Barry
O'Reilly, Jez Humble, and Joanne Molesky. See also overview of this approach at the IRS from Dec 2015.17

18. Small batches reduce risk and increase controls
18
Five risks that small batches reduce
1. Bug swarms – less software leads to faster
fixing
2. Useless software – don’t wait 6+ months to
find out, when you can find out every 24
hours
3. Stymied innovation – daily opportunities to
learn and innovate
4. Budget overruns – check in daily on ROI
and projections. Shut it down early and re-
try if needed
5. Schedule elongation – if you ship every
day, guaranteed, how can you ever be late?
Source: "Dear Developers, Small Batch Releases Are Your Friend," Coté, Feb 2016, also in The Register.
"There have obviously been culture
shocks. What is more interesting
though is that the teams that tend to
have the worst culture shock are not
those typical teams that you might think
of, audit or compliance. In fact, if
you’re able to successfully
communicate to them what you’re
doing, DevOps and all of the
associated practices seem like
common sense. [Auditors] say, 'Why
weren’t we doing this before?’”
"DevOps Enterprise Adoption at E*TRADE,”
InfoQ/DOES, Jan 2016.

19. DevOps, the word defines itself
19
(1.)
DevOps is the practice of operations
and development engineers
participating together in the entire
service lifecycle, from design through
the development process to production
support.
(2.)
DevOps is also characterized by
operations staff making use of many of
the same techniques as developers for
their systems work.
Source: “What Is DevOps?,” The Agile Admin, Dec 2011. For more: Effective DevOps, Jennifer Davis, Katherine Daniels, May, 2016; see
The Practice of Cloud System Administration, chapter 8 for an in-depth definition and discussion. Also, see Damon Edward's 2012 piece
"Use DevOps to Turn IT into a Strategic Weapon.” Also, The Phoenix Project for a story of DevOps in the style of The Goal.

20. Defining DevOps by practices and goals, part 1
20

21. Defining DevOps by practices and goals, part 2
21

22. Go big with small batches
Sources: "Ford teams with Pivotal, bets on Cloud Foundry," Larry Dignan, ZDNet, Dec 2015;”Application Modernization, Service By
Microservice," Forrester, Dec 2015. See also BMC Software case study in The Concise Executive Guide to Agile and Cutter Executive
Report, Vol. 9, No. 9, 2008.
"We did an analysis of hundreds
of projects over a multi-year
period. The ones that delivered
in less than a quarter
succeeded about 80% of the
time, while the ones that lasted
more than a year failed at
about the same rate. We're
simply not very good at large
efforts.”
-Dev leader, large financial22
“… sped up software
development times from
months to weeks using
agile techniques.”

23. The Tools
23

24. 24
Sources: "The New Developer Landscape: Understanding the Modern Software Developer," Al Hilwa, March 2016. See also: "Application
Modernization, Service By Microservice," Kurt Bittner and Randy Heffner, Dec 2015, Forrester. See the“The RedMonk Programming
Language Rankings: January 2016” for popular programming languages.

25. A microservices approach gives you organizational
agility, at the expense of architectural complexity
25
Benefits
• Decoupling service
releases, teams
• Faster innovation cycles
• Composite applications
vs. monolithic apps
Problems
• The one about the
murder mystery
• Incompatible APIs
• You still need other
people to do work
It’s worth solving the problems if you want the benefits
…and it’s possible!

26. The application framework promises
Codebase
Dependencie
s Config
Backing
Services
Build,
Release,
Run
Processes
Port
Binding
Concurrency
Disposability
Dev/Prod
Parity
Logs
Admin
Processes
Source: “The Twelve-Factor App.”
• A set of best practices for
developing and deploying
cloud-native software.
• Practices translate into
platform features and
workflow requirements.
26

27. A deep look at the cloud platform value line
27
Source: Pivotal; "Technical Dive into Cloud Native Application Platforms," Brian Gracely, Wikibon, Sep 2015. See also "The cloud-native
future," Casey West, O'Reilly Radar, Aug 2015

28. Transforming:
28

29. Transformation starts with “management”
• Leading change
management
• Setting,
communicating,
tracking goals
• Dramatic organization
change, gradually
Sources: Leading the Transformation, 2015; “Management’s Job is orchestrating the ‘why,’” 2015; The Concise Executive Guide to Agile,
2010.29
“At the end of the day, we are just looking to start
by changing one behavior, which can get the
momentum spinning to drive a much larger
cultural change.” -Matt Curry, Allstate

30. Staffing: There is no talent shortage
F100 CTO:
“But Netflix has a superstar dev team, we don’t!”
@adrianco:
“We hired them from you.”
Source: @blueboxjesse, Oct 2014. See also “There is no talent shortage.”30

31. To change, you must actually change
Or, how t-shirts jump-start digital transformation
“I can’t tell you what having a leader
stand up in front of an organization
with a hoodie and t-shirt does to
cultural change. It all of the sudden
makes it OK for everyone within that
organization to participate in
change.”
-Matt Curry, Allstate
31 Source: “How Allstate Upped Productivity By Killing Meetings & Wearing T-Shirts,” Coté, June 2016.

32. Dealing with legacy: the stuff that makes all the
money
Quarantine
• Low-impact
applications
• Lacks good
testing, risky to
change
• Change-resistant
priorities
Migration Strategies
• Virtualize and re-platform
to control costs and
maximize management
• API gateways combined
with the strangler pattern
• Portfolio management
(cf. The Three Horizons)
Sources: “DevOps isn't just about the new: It's about cleaning up the old, too,” Coté, April 2016; The Cloud Native Journey, Coté, 2016;
Escape Velocity, Geoffrey Moore, Sep 2011 and "To Succeed in the Long Term, Focus on the Middle Term," Geoffrey Moore, August
2007.
32

33. Cloud-native approaches speed up the whole process,
more efficiently than previously possible
Source: “Deployments We Can Believe In,” Diego Lapiduz, 18F, June 2015; see also “Barriers to DevOps in Government,” Coté, Oct 2015;
Humana keynote, CF Summit 2015; Gregg Otto at CF Summit NA 2016.
18F/cloud.gov
ATO reduction from
9-14 months to 2-3 days
• Humana Cue Apple Watch app:
“Two people built the app and got it
into the AppStore in five weeks.”
• Large financial institution on PCF:
145 apps with 2 ops people
• “We get features in days, not
weeks, and scale takes minutes,
not months.” –Gregg Otto, Comcast
33

34. For more: transforming to cloud native
(1.)
Greenfield
Projects
(2.)
Dealing with
Legacy
(3.)
Corporate
Transformation
Get the free booklet at http://cote.io/pivotal34

35. Thanks!@cote | cote@pivotal.io
Slides: http://cote.io/unicorn-coding/
“We are uncovering better
ways of developing software
by doing it and helping others
do it.”
- The Agile Manifesto, 2001
35

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