Software Delivery in Small Batches

This episode completes our introduction to the three ways of DevOps. The previous two episodes introduced flow and feedback. Flow, the first way, establishes fast left to right flow from development to production. Feedback, the second way of DevOps, establishes right to left feedback from production to development, so using the state of production informs development decisions. The Third Way of DevOps, establishes a culture of experimentation and learning around improving flow and feedback.

Be sure to check out the Toyota Kata for more continuous improvement.

Books

• The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, John Willis, Patrick Debois
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

The DevOps Handbook & Accelerate are the source material for this episode. 

The Principle of Feedback, or the second way of DevOps, describes using right to left feedback in the value stream. This episode explores how telemetry is more than error data or alerts. When used right (i.e. paired with experimentation), telemetry provides an objective way to move towards shared goals. 

Books

• The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, John Willis, Patrick Debois
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

The DevOps Handbook & Accelerate are the source material for this episode. 

The principle of flow, or the first way of DevOps, calls for building fast feedback from development to production. In practice this mean implementing continuous delivery.

Books

• The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, John Willis, Patrick Debois
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

The DevOps Handbook & Accelerate are the source material for this episode. 

The DevOps Handbook is the best introduction to DevOps available. It puts the value stream at the center of an IT company, thus it’s in the company’s best interest to optimize the value stream. The DevOps Handbook presents the “Three Ways”: flow, feedback, and learning.

Accelerate picks up where the DevOps Handbook left off. The three ways cover theory and relevant technical practices, but does not precisely define success criteria. Accelerate defines four metrics for measuring IT performance: lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR, and change failure rate. Research done by the authors also presents low, medium, and high performance targets for each metric. 

Combining theory and practices from The DevOps Handbook and metrics from Accelerate provide a solid philosophy for software development and measuring performance. That’s “DevOps” in a nutshell.

Books

• The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, John Willis, Patrick Debois
• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim