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DevOps: Finding Silos and Fixing Them

Sagar Karmarkar

[email protected]

Houston Agile Conference 2018 1

About me!


Source: linkedin.com

Airlines Consulting Engineering Financial Svcs Retail / Retirement

23+ years of experience

VnV DevOps


• DevOps Transformation Consulting

• Organic DevOps

• How to hire for DevOps

Traditional Silos ..


What is a Silo?

• A team or a group is said to be working

in a “silo” when members of a team or

group find themselves working in a

disconnected manner from other

teams or groups.


Source: rundeck.com

Task-Driven Request QueuesRequest Queues seem like an organized and efficient way to manage work. These queues are

often the manifestation of Silos.

Silos create problems such as:

• Bottlenecks

• Slow handoffs

• Miscommunication

• Tooling mismatches

• Delivery errors

• Excess rework

• Conflict (usually the finger-pointing type)


Source: rundeck.com

Agile Teams can become silos!• Large organizations that work on multiple products typically structure their development

staff as an independent team of individuals working on one product.

• In order to integrate two or more products, the teams may need to share resources

(developers, testers) between the teams for one or more sprints

• The integration might require operations staff of one team to support a new web server or

database once the integrated system is deployed. There may be new security concerns.

• Both teams may be using different tools and processes. As the teams work together cross-

functionally, they will naturally share their knowledge and experiences about those tools

and processes, which will lead to the teams aligning with each other.


Source: techbeacon.com

How do I know if I have Silos? Some more specific ways to detect silos on teams include an observation of the following:

QA is unaware of what features should be tested

Development produces code that is not easily testable

IT/Operations pushes new releases out at their own whim

Development and QA are surprised by what is running in production


Source: Matt Brewster

DevOps breaks the silo effect …


DevOps Pipeline

Agile broke down barriers between Customers, BAs, Architects, Developers &

QAs

DevOps extends this collaboration to include infrastructure, release management, support and other

roles in IT operations

ArtifactRepository

FT, PTPackageStatic Code

Analysis

Unit Tests

Deploy to Environment

Compile

DevOps Capabilities


• Continuous Delivery: Continuous Delivery takes the concept of continuous integration to the next step –extending to the entire release chain, including QA, operationsand infrastructure

• Continuous Monitoring: The goal of continuous monitoring is to quickly determine when a service is unavailable, understand the underlying causes, and to apply these learnings to anticipate problems before they occur

• Continuous Integration: Enticing developers to integrate their work with other developers at least daily—exposes integration issues and conflicts much earlier than is the case with waterfall development.

• Continuous Testing: In a DevOps environment, everyone is involved in testing. Developers make sure that, along with delivering error-free code, they provide test data sets and automated test cases

“Continuous” implies Automation and Cross-Functional Collaboration

Comparison between Capabilities


Continuous Monitoring

Continuous Testing

Intensity of Automation and Collaboration

Incr

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DevOps Platform

DevOps is about “speeding up outcomes”*How do you measure the ability to deliver on heightened expectations?

• Improve speed at which your organization delivers change• How often you are deploying changes to keep up with customer needs?• How long it takes to deploy a finished feature?

• Improve team efficiency• How often do the changes that are deployed fail?• How quickly can your organization resolve those failures?

• Mitigate risk and ensure changes adhere to compliance policies• How frequently are compliance assessments run?• How quickly are vulnerabilities remediated?


* Source: Gene Kim, Nathan Harvey

Back to the Silo conversation …

• Establish communities of practice and open them to people from all “silos”. This exposes people to others with similar specialties, such as Java programmers, user-experience specialists, or security architects, and enables the exchange of information and ideas across different parts of the organization. Collocated events such as lectures, meetupsor virtual forums such as discussion boards helps bring a culture of learning to the organization.

• Foster an innovation culture that encourages people from different silos to work together on new ideas.


* Source: Gene Kim

References


Q & A


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