#B20CON

ITSM DEVOPS CONFERENCE

TheConvergenceofWills

MikeBlandInstigator

#B20CON

October 2013

November 2013

April 2014

So now what?

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb...Again

Google 2005

Inexperience

Code gets added.

Tools get slower.

Builds take longer.

Tests take forever.

Code goes untested.

Dependency cruft builds.

Large, infrequent changes frequently conflict.

Builds break overnight.

Emergency pushes common.

Fear is the mind killer.

InertiaEnormous early success

Overconfidence, arrogance,Impostor Syndrome Insecurity

Inexperience,“My code is too hard to test” Ignorance

Old tools,“I don’t have time to test.” Friction

(After-the-fact: goto fail; and Heartbleed)

Impact of testing is impossible to measure a priori

Priority Structure

If it can’t be measured,(e.g. more clicks)

it doesn’t matter.(i.e. won’t get me promoted)

Ignorance/Communication Breakdown

How does culture change?

Not like this…

Or like this…

Beware of heroes, echo chambers

Cultivate mythology as a useful model

The organization should empower every individual

“If people believe they lack the power…”

If people believe they lack the power to solve a problem,

Saul Alinsky, paraphrased from Rules for Radicals

they won’t even think of trying to solve it.

Knowledge and Power

What did we have to work with?

TransparencyEmployee directory, project database, wiki/Sites

Freedom to experiment,20% time Autonomy

Grouplet system,startup ethos Collaboration

Crossing the Chasm

GWS tech lead Bharat Mediratta believed

automated testing would help…

…and it did.

Started by Bharat Mediratta and Nick

LesieckiVolunteers pooling

20% timeto drive adoption of automated testing

Testing Grouplet

Testing on the Toilet (TotT)

Test Certified (TC)

Test Mercenaries

Ubiquitous,incremental exposure

Clear, tangible path via measurement, policy, goals

Hands-on help, tooladoption and advocacy

Company-wide events, usually one day long

Address “important but not urgent” backlog

Focus, motivation, concrete goals, free stuff

Fixits

Five years later…

Rainbow of Death: Testing Grouplet

Intervene Validate Inform Inspire EmpowerMentor

Dependent Independent

Fixits

Test Certified

Build OrbsLectures

TotT

CodelabsTool development(w/ Testing Tech,

Build Tools)

Test MercenariesTech Talks Testing Grouplet

All projectsTest Certified

Level 3

Revolution Fixit (build tools)

Test Certified Mentors

TAP Fixit(CI platform)

Google Stats 2015 via Rachel Potvin

15 million LoC in 250K files changed by humansper week

15K commits by humans per day30K commits by automated systems per day

800K/second peak file requests

Power and knowledge to do the right thing

Thorough automated testing now the norm

Most breakages fixed before clients notice

Less fear, more confidence, flow, and joy

The Value to Developers

David and Golaith

How could we be so surewe were doing the right thing?

Business ValueValue is a hypothesis that an investment will

contribute to desired outcomes,

Mark Schwartz, paraphrased from The Art of Business Value

discovered via experimentation,by a team empowered to create

value.

Complex adaptive systemsSelf-organizing under leadership’s influence

Elements, interconnections, purpose

Behavior > information flow > interconnections

Changing the purpose changes the system

and its behavior

Systems devised to shape human behavior without accounting for human

nature are destined to fail.

What is innovation?

Ford: “...they’d’ve asked for a faster horse.”

Jobs: “1000 songs in your pocket!”

Jefferson: “...someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all

together...”

U.S. federal government 2016

limiting perceived riskmeeting regulatory requirements

job securityInternalization: Don’t rock the boat

Priority Structure

InertiaNo quality incentives, PCSRA,“successful company” people

Avoid risk/“accountability”,“gov’t can’t attract talent” Insecurity

Waterfall is familiar,testing is someone else’s job Ignorance

Outdated tools/procedures,vendor lock-in of code, data Friction

Policy often mandated by nontechnical people

Development teams disconnected from end users

They don’t know what they don’t know

Ignorance/Communication Breakdown

Employee directoryCode browser

Project data baseWiki

EngEDUCodelabs

First day at Google, August 29, 2005

Tech TalksSnippets

Objectives and Key Results

20% timeGrouplets

Where are the docs?Who do I ask?

What do I need to know?How do I get access to everything?

Who’s on my team?Who’s working on what?

How can I contribute?

First day in government, November 3, 2014

Building a learning organization

The team that became great didn’t start off great—it learned how to produce extraordinary

results.Peter Senge, from The Fifth Discipline

The Hub

Team API

.about.yml

Grouplets

Pages

Guides

Edu

Rainbow of Death: federal gov’t 2016

Intervene Validate Inform Inspire EmpowerMentor

Dependent Independent

Consulting

Success stories on blog

Hub

DeliveryDiscovery

sprints

Guides

Edu

Workshops

UsefulMythology

Positive user experiences

Digital Coalition

Working Groups/Guilds

Onboarding Revamp

Pages

Gov’t-wide Hub

Cross-agency collaboration

Team API

TransparencyThe Hub, Team API, .about.yml

Pages, Guides, Edu Autonomy

Grouplets, Open Source Collaboration

Nothing new under the sunThe Mythical Man-Month, 1975:

adding people increases complexity,data speaks louder than flow charts

“No silver bullet”, 1986:accidental vs. essential complexity;

foreshadowed the Agile movement by a decade, and DevOps by two

Meet the new boss...

Old organizational habits die hard—even in new organizations!

“Why Employees Stay”, Harvard Business Review,July 1973!!!

The U.S.: the ultimate system

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happinessChecks and balances

Stable, yet amendable constitutionBill of Rights

Protection from “tyrrany of the majority”

Lessons from Open Source

Eric S. Raymond,“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”

Kropotkin:“Severe effort of many converging wills”

America is a proven framework for the convergence of wills

So is DevOps

TransparencyAutonomy

CollaborationSystems thinkingExperimentation

Emergence

Don’t just checkthe right boxes

Empower everyone to do their best work

The organization isn’t as important as the people in it

None More Black

https://mike-bland.com/

https://github.com/mbland/

Slides: https://goo.gl/DhVxis