DevOps Culture and the Informed Workspace

While the DevOps culture has been heavily focused on what tools to use, little thought has been given to what type of workspaces are needed. Ever since the early days of agile, the importance of an informative workspace has been known. Many of the practices around working together, pair programming and the Onsite Customer from Extreme Programming were to enable the rapid flow and visualization of how the team is doing. Other aspects, such as the Big Visual Chart, were included to keep the information flowing. We have made great progress in this category, but we still have more to do. Now, fast forward to the DevOps culture. Much like the original agile movement, DevOps is a relatively unique change in the world of work that involves both cultural and technical shifts. It’s just not enough to have cool new tools like Puppet and Chef, or any of the other cool tools that make continuous delivery “a thing.” We need to be able to think about how we are planning our stories. We need to be able to be including acceptance criteria that go beyond just “is it done,” but also all the way to “is it staying done?” We often run into this as agile consultants. I have often gone to work with a client and their number one concern as we are going through the engagement is “ok, and what do we do on day one of the sprint when we don’t have you here coaching us?” Now, they are fine on their own, but part of the plan is to know what to do after the training wheels are off. Let’s look at that same idea in terms of DevOps Culture. Stories have a very limited life. Once the product owner has accepted the story, we tear it up and throw it away, metaphorically speaking. But that isn’t the end of the story. The software now needs to live and breathe in the big wide world. How do we do that? DevOps is of course the answer, but what exactly does that mean? Workspaces in the DevOps Culture As mentioned earlier in this article, the idea of an informed workspace is a valuable tool in our belt for moving deeper and wider into the DevOps culture. Think back to one of the biggest cultural changes called for in the early adoption of agile. Agile called for bringing QA into the room. We aren’t treating QA as a separate team, but part of the team. All of a sudden we are paying close attention to the number of tests that are passing. So now part of our Big Visual Chart is focused on the pass/fail rate of our tests, not just the status of the story itself. This shift took a lot of effort, and I think that if we are honest with ourselves it’s not done yet. But that is an article for another time. We want to take a deeper look at the keys to successfully affecting a further transformation to the DevOps culture. What aspects will really help us do more than just have lots of automated builds that we call done, with no thought to what happens after? The first step is to think about the cultural changes required. What is it that we will need to change in our thinking in order to make DevOps more than just another buzzword at our shop? The first, and hardest, change is to stop thinking in terms of the “DevOps team”. The whole team is part of Dev and Ops. There just is no wall to throw “finished” product over anymore. It’s all about creating great and long lasting software. There are many steps that we have already taken to get there, but this is one of the biggest. So let’s take a look at the different activities that really make a DevOps culture thrive. DevOps Activities Of course, the first thing one thinks about when discussing DevOps is the activities that support continuous delivery. This means an even higher need for all tests to be automated. Unit tests are merely the start, followed closely by automating your acceptance tests. Having these tests running continuously throughout the day is basically the cost of entry into the DevOps culture. Without a strong continuous integration server, running tests all day and every day, we just can’t be sure that what we are releasing is of a high enough quality to stay healthy in the real world. After that, the art of continuous deployment becomes an additional challenge. Orchestration tools are vital to make sure the right bits get bundled with the other right bits, and then get put where they belong. And then, since we are all part of “keeping the lights on,” we need monitoring tools to help us visualize whether our software really is behaving properly. So yes, there is a definite technical aspect to DevOps. That’s a lot of moving parts! We need to keep track of where we are. This leads to one of the cool parts of a true DevOps implementation. All those cool monitors that the Ops guys get with the fancy graphs and uptime charts? They come into the room with the Ops people. And we need to add to them. We are going to track story progress from idea to implementation, and then into the wild. My acceptance criteria are going to include things like “must have Nagios hooks” and “will use less then x% of CPU”. And now we have to live up to it. This means it is more important than ever to be able to visualize the entire flow. Our Big Visual Charts need to be able to show us not just how the current iteration is going. They must show us the state of the build server, the state of the various builds and where they are in any of the extended process, such as UAT, etc. And, in the unlikely event of a failure anywhere along the line, or in post/production, we can follow a clear chain of events back to find the problem quickly. Conclusion So now we see that, while DevOps is primarily a people problem, there are a lot of technical aspects that enable a strong DevOps culture. The key to success is the union of the people and technical aspects, which in a way make DevOps a Cyborg. In order to balance these two aspects, and in order to keep ourselves from burning countless hours and countless brain cells chasing down all of the moving parts, we need to focus on Information. The more Information that we can have at our fingertips, the more effective we will be. Each team will identify which information is the most meaningful to them, and how best to interpret it. You can bet that this will be in live charts rather than stale reports. Being able to orchestrate the entire flow of a story’s life, from inception to realization to retirement will be much easier if we can visualize each step of the way. If this means our team room might start looking like the command center in war games, what’s so bad about that?