Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate, LEGOand Scrum GameVersion 2.0

Dana Pylayeva

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/chocolatelegogame

This version was published on 2015-08-17

This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishingprocess. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools andmany iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction onceyou do.

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Also By Dana PylayevaChocolate, LEGO and Scrum Game. V 1.0

Шоколад, ЛЕГО и Scrum

To my favorite LEGO, games and Star Wars consultant - my daughter Erica. Thank you for yourcuriosity, playfulness, love and ideas.

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1A little bit of history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Why LEGO and Chocolate? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Why Scrum? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Who is this game for? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3The Book and Packages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

IntroductionA little bit of history

If you know about the origins of DevOps term, feel free to skip this chapter. Otherwise, read on tolearn about people and ideas that brought DevOps movement to life and the role Twitter played incoining the term “DevOps”.

It is hard to imagine now that less than eight years ago we didn’t have DevOps word in ourtech vocabulary. Organizations around the world were experimenting with Agile processes andpractices in their development teams. 86% of them were reportedly enjoying accelerated time-to-market and increased productivity. The life on the operations side of the house was quite different.It was a time of large data centers, expensive relational databases and physical servers that had tobe ordered from the vendors over three months in advance. It was a life of nightly deployments,emergencies, pagers, SOPs and escalation procedures. Occasionally, these emergencies were causedby applications implemented earlier by the development teams. Yet, it was the on-call DBA or theon-call Sys Admin who were called to fix them in the middle of the night. This was the way thingswere.

Up until one day when a Belgian IT consultant Patrick Dubois decided that he would aim toexpand his area of expertise by working at every part of IT organization. What he discovered wasa striking difference of goals, incentives, processes and tools between development and operations.Desperately trying to find like-minded people, interested in helping bridge the gap between Dev andOps, Patrick discovered a bird-of-a-feather session on “Agile Infrastructure” proposed by AndrewShafer at Agile2008 conference. The two of them later formed the “Agile System Administration”Google group. However, at that time, there were so few people interested in the topic that the groupdidn’t get much traction.This all changed at Velocity 2009 conference, when John Allspaw and Paul Hammond shared theirexperience of Dev and Ops cooperation at Flickr in a pivotal presentation “10 + Deploys per day”.This presentation had pushed the limits of what’s possible and inspired many followers. Encouragedby this talk and, at the same time, disappointed that he couldn’t attend it in person, Patrick decidedto organize his own conference. He put together a two days event for Developers and Operations tocome together, exchange ideas and collaborate. The first ever DevOpsDays conference brought toBelgium a number of leading practitioners from around the world, who continued the conversationsand collaboration on Twitter long after the event. Through this massive use in the post-conferenceconversations, original #DevOpsDays Twitter hash tag became too long. The “Days” was dropped -#DevOps hash tag and the DevOps movement were born.

Interestingly enough, in spite of this fast growing popularity of the movement, there is still no singlestandard definition of DevOps. Is this a tool, a new department, a job title?

Introduction 2

There are a lot of different interpretations of what it is. To the extent that Gartner analysts intheir 2014 report “Seven steps to start your DevOps initiative” recommended as a step number One:“Define DevOps for you.” My personal favorites are the following two DevOps definitions:

“A movement of people who care about developing and operating reliable, secure, high performancesystems at scale.” - Jez Humble

“Amix of patterns intended to improve collaboration between development and operations. DevOpsaddresses shared goals and incentives as well as shared processes and tools.”- Michael Hüttermann

If your organization is considering DevOps, a great way to start is by generating some interestand excitement around the topic. Using Chocolate, Lego and Scrum game as part of your DevOpsadoption strategy will help you popularize the DevOps ideas and make them digestible at all levelsof organizations. The game combines ideas from “The Phoenix Project” with the experience gainedfrom real-life challenges, encountered by development and operations teams in many organiza-tions. Security vulnerabilities, environments patching, deployment code freeze, development andoperations silos - the game helps simulate an end-to-end product delivery process and visualize thebottlenecks in the value delivery flow.

Why LEGO and Chocolate?

Studies at Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, MassachusettsGeneral Hospital and Harvard Medical School found that our brain assembles the data receivedfrom sensory inputs into a complete picture that becomes a memory of an event. Engaging multiplesenses while learning helps amplify learning effectiveness. Additionally, when we experience anemotional reaction, it becomes part of the memory, strengthening it dramatically.

Chocolate, LEGO and Scrum game is designed to engage all five senses and tap into the emotionalside of the brain. Working with LEGO and Chocolate, participants experience the downside oflocal optimization and learn to expand their view to include the entire system. Using avatars,personas and role cards, participants gain an understanding of Dev and Ops roles as well as theirinterdependencies. Throughout the game they go through a range of emotions and learn to expandthe boundaries of individual roles, acquire T-shaped skills and grow the Scrum-team circle toinclude Operations. They build new environments, protect them from Hacker attacks and workwith demanding customers, trying to satisfy their ever-changing demands. The game takes theplayers through a gamified DevOps transformation journey, facilitating the first baby steps towardsembracing the DevOps culture.

Why Scrum?

According to 9th Annual State of Agile Survey from VersionOne, Scrum remains the number oneAgile methodology, practiced by organizations around the world. This popularity of Scrum ensures

Introduction 3

that workshop participants have a common baseline, a shared understanding of an iteration-basedAgile development framework. In the game design theory terms, this simplifies “onboarding ofplayers”.

Who is this game for?

For you, if you are working with an organization exhibiting at least one of the following dysfunc-tions:

• Agile methodologies are used in the development organizations only, while Operations continuesto use plan-driven waterfall approach;

• developers have no idea about the post-deployment performance of their software;

• delayed, infrequent deployments of “potentially shippable product increments” cause servicedisruption in production;

• every new security vulnerability causes a major panic and requires a lengthy manual patching ofthe environments.

This game can be facilitated as part of stand-along DevOps training or as a DevOps extension to astandard Scrum training. Detailed descriptions of the roles and their dependencies make it possibleto adopt the game for an ITIL training as well.

The Book and Packages.

This book provides a detailed description of the game andincludes:

1. Three variations of the game adjusted to a specific session time box ( 75 min, 90 min and 4hours)

2. Two options for the room setup (round tables vs. rectangular tables)3. List of Supplies4. Detailed description of each role and their dependencies.5. Facilitation instructions.6. Debriefing points.

Additionally, you may choose to purchase:

1. Supporting PowerPoint slides2. Players Role Cards.

Introduction 4