Enterprise Automationur doin’ it wrong

who is this guy?

Mykel Alvis (@mykelalvis) Sr. Consultant at MomentumSI MomentumSI is a leading IT consultancy focused on enterprise

transformation http://www.momentumsi.com malvis@momentumsi.com

enterprise?

slow, expensive, sluggish, inefficient "Enterprise applications are about the display, manipulation,

and storage of large amounts of often complex data and the support or automation of business processes with that data.” – Martin Fowler

!entertainment, !productivity software that costs money, generally lots of it, if it doesn’t work

properly

who are you?

enterprise automation, not webops relatively slow SDLC non-cloud, maybe even totally non-virtual agile, agile-sounding, or maybe just (fr)agile probably a lot of brownfield dev process weight doesn’t really matter

what are you looking for?

cheap/fast/correct faster time-to-delivery more reliable and/or correct pushes less expensive cycles ease the pain

what do you really get?

failure partial success eventual acquiescence and redefinition of success reduced happiness

who wants to be happy?

executive management mid-level management business analysts development operations

who gets to be happy?

nobody precious few people who actually understand deployment

how you aren’t happy

delivery cycles are long successful deployments are rare replicability is uncommon or unknown

how ur doin’ it wrong

apathy lack of focus on delivery lack of support for automation

apathy

ap·a·thy [ap-uh-thee] noun, plural ap·a·thies. 1. absence or suppression of passion,

emotion, or excitement. 2. lack of interest in or concern for things that others find

moving or exciting. 3. Also, ap·a·thei·a, ap·a·thi·a [ap-uh-thee-uh]. Stoicism.

freedom from emotion of any kind. -- Dictionary.com

Enterprise-level Apathytm

code isn’t written to be deployed and nobody cares about that code promotion transition is not smooth and management does

not make that a priority general apathy is rampant, especially within larger organizations

causes of apathy

lack of clear goals lack of motivation for your goal lack of power to achieve goals

overcoming apathy (or whatever)

apathy is a bit (lot?/exactly?) like depression do something (anything!) gain a new goal try to make small positive differences extract yourself from negative groupthink

lack of focus on delivery

delivery is, or at least should be, part of the satisfaction of requirement

without delivery, there is no software “elegant” is unfortunately often a synonym for “unintelligible” delivery really means re-delivery delivery, and especially easy delivery, is an essential part of

practically all testing schemes

focusing on delivery

SLAs for everyone (analysis, development, QA, ops) upgrades should be automatic through delivery start from known quantities feature-poor code that delivers beats feature-rich code that

does not things that impede the delivery are Bad Things don’t forget non-delivery concerns

lack of support for automation

leadership support tool support training support

increasing automation support

utilize tools to control configuration collect time and success metrics build management is essential to a delivery pipeline

common solution elements

start from the top find a champion start small and deliver incrementally continually refactor your process keep your automation current

uncommon solution elements

start from the bottom hire your champion hide your talents under a bushel (for a while) think big, then start small and deliver incrementally continually refactor your process keep your automation current

(some of) The Right Waytm

plan for automation from the start processes that enable, but don’t disable use semantic versions manage your source intelligently manage your dependencies intelligently define environments as source code baseline environments from known states avoid “frankensystems” seek smooth transitions define SLAs for developers as well as operations deployment code, not deployment meat combat apathy everywhere don’t write, or allow others to write, code that’s hard to deploy

fin