🗞 Stream Recap: DevOps in Small-Medium Businesses
Engineering Culture #17—Here's what you missed
Hey, it’s Denis—Wow what a great episode! Best one so far. Thanks to all of you who joined live, special thanks to and Bryan Finster for engaging into superb conversation!
Talking Points
“Avoid heroics—phoenix project. Setting up processes that are cumbersome and require heroics from a few key people will undermine the team’s overall ability to grow and learn.”
“You will always encounter resistance while trying to improve upon lacking cultural practices. This is a natural process. It is not personal or permanent.”
“Avoid JIRA-induced individuated definitions of done: ‘the ticket is done for me because I reassigned it to you.’”
“DevOps is everywhere and it seems everybody's using it for something else."
“DevOps is not computer science. We are building products. We are building pipelines that operate and monitor those products. You can’t do short experiments endlessly and expect to have an amazing product in 6 months. You need a pipeline for that.”
“DevOps is not a person and it's not really a team. It is basically a mentality.”
“[DevOps is] end to end responsibility, meaning that you actually own the process. So you are able to own the product creation from beginning to end. You basically run your product.”
“The main dysfunction that I see often in small medium businesses and startups, is that the team is never allowed really to get together and mold and sort of talk about the product, talk about the challenges. And they get stuck in the delivery pipeline.”
“If you don't have end to end responsibility across the entire pipeline, which means you're doing hand offs or hand backs, then... The engineer just goes to work and goes home at 5 p. m. and they just tick a box.”
“A bureaucratic organization [Westrum’s model] follows rule-based pipelines: you need to hand off your work to the next person in the pipeline. A generative culture collaborates instead across the entire value stream—there’s no reason to rush pushing code if it doesn’t make it into the hands off the user shortly after.”
“DevOps can include UX. There is no reason why your designers shouldn’t be a part of the complete team. It’s always good to have multiple disciplines to translate the feedback to create a common understanding for the team.“
“Product feedback can be very irrational. I get it, it’s hard. And you have to do them in aggregates, so you have to contextualize ‘Okay, what does this mean? Is it just this person's opinion or is it actually a problem with the product?’ Because with a lot of small / medium businesses, I see a lot of needless features being added to a product. And then a few big ones to a big whale client.”
“Startups and small engineering organizations. I see the normal tendency of ‘deployments are painful, we want to do them less often and deploy something bigger.’ That is the root cause of all issues with the department that they're hyper optimizing efficiency on a painful process rather than making the process less cumbersome.“
“If you get someone from outside who's coming once in a while and fixing your pipelines and deployment procedures then still the team is not enabled to do that.
You don't build up. So you don't develop your developers to the point that they actually can handle this. So you don't include the discipline of ops. This team will never overcome this hurdle.”
Recordings
Highlights (AI generated)
🤬 DevOps isn’t sysops, site reliability engineering or configuring jenkins and kubernetes. That is merely part of the delivery process. DevOps is the marriage of product design & engineering and delivery.
💡 "DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users." Donovan Brown's definition of DevOps emphasizes the importance of collaboration and value delivery over rigid procedure and bureaucracy.
💡A well-rounded DevOps team requires all the necessary skills to ideate, build, and run the system, rather than relying on specialists for specific tasks.
🌐 The addictive nature of positive feedback in small-medium businesses can to positive feedback loops. It also creates a quick feedback of insecurity when risk-factors in the process are discovered that undermine the team’s ability to deliver confidently.
🛠️ DevOps is about making the customer's problem your problem, regardless of your station, and owning the responsibility to fix it. Minimise hand-offs and follow your deliverable artefact across each step. Push back on being siloed.
🧠 Cultivating product and business understanding in one brain is crucial for the success of a team, rather than having individual heroes dominating their particular field and creating toxic environments.
💡 It's not just about talking to senior developers, but reaching everyone from junior developers to the CTO in order to create a great engineering culture.
💡 The real efficacy of software engineering and DevOps is about the decision-making process and taking responsibility, not just typing code or pushing things to production.
🔧 Empower your team to attack vigorously anything in the pipeline that makes people feel miserable to improve engineering culture and holistic DevOps.
Super 👍