The Changing Role of Release Engineering in

a DevOps WorldJ. Paul Reed

Managing PartnerRelease Engineering Approaches

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@jpaulreed

A Little Survey

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Back in the Day

HumbleBeginningsas aBuild/Release Monkey…

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Back in the Day

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J. Paul Reed @jpaulreed on Managing Partner at Release

Engineering Approaches The Ship Show alumnus 15+ years build/release

engineering experience Today: A “DevOps™ Consultant”

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Shippin’ Bits

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“Yeeahhh... so what would you... say ya do here?”

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The Elephant in the Room

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We All Agree on DevOps, Right?

“Please explain to me: what exactly is DevOps?”

What We Look Like Answering…

“Uhm... so what technological capabilities will we gain if we ‘Do

DevOps?’”

What We Look Like Answering…

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What We Look Like Answering…

“Uhm... so what technologicalcapabilities will we gain if we

‘Do DevOps?’”

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Requisite Silo Photo

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Requisite Silo Photo

Dev

elop

men

t

Ope

rati

ons

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Requisite Silo Photo

Dev

elop

men

t

Ope

rati

ons

Prod

uct

Man

agem

ent

Sale

s/M

arke

ting

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A Small Digression on Silos

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Actual Silos

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Back to Silos

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Back to Silos

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Back to Silos

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“Yeeahhh... so what kind of DevOps... would you... say ya do here?”

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What do “DevOps Teams” do? Configuration Management Continuous Integration Developing & Supporting Deployment / Pipeline Tools Dependency / Artifact Management Versioning / SCM Operations (Maybe?)

What did we used to call these things?

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“Continuous Delivery is a Set of Principles and

Practices to Reduce the Cost, Time, and Risk of Delivering Incremental

Changes to Users.”

-Jez Humble

Continuous Delivery is your Organization— Your Entire Organization—caring about release engineering and quality assurance in a way it has never cared about them before. Ever.

- J. Paul Reed

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Back to Silos

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Back to Silos

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Anyone Else Feel Like…

“I feel like I’m taking CRAZY PILLS!!”

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PeopleCare!

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Systems Thinking is a Thing™

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Resources

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Pain is shared

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“[Computing] is pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. But pop culture holds a disdain for history.

Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present.

I think the same is true of most people who write code for money.

They have no idea where [their culture came from].”

— Alan Kay

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Versioning is Fun

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Versioning is Fun

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Versioning is Fun

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Versioning is Fun

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1st Law of DevOpsDynamics

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Visibility is Hard

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If You Stare at this All Day

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The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?

- Robert I. Sutton

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Sorry… No One Wants These

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Like Uber, but for RelEng

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The Hard Truth

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[It’s] important to understand the strategy, the context, and the value that’s important to your organization; and then how you play into those.

- Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Chef

“Until you take the time to sit and understand that, DevOps for the sake of DevOps doesn’t matter.”

- Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Chef

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The Cruel PunchlineThe Single Practice Correlated to Improvement in… Deployment Frequency Lead Time for Changes Mean Time to Recover

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The Cruel PunchlineThe Single Practice Correlated to Improvement in… Deployment Frequency Lead Time for Changes Mean Time to Recover

Use of Version Control for All Production Artifacts

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3 Weird Tricks

1. Every release engineering strategy you deploy must to be:- Complexity-informed- Accounts for the entirety of the system (systems thinking)

- Address human factors

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Cynefin Sensemaking FrameworkComplex Complicated

Chaotic Simple

ProbeSense

Respond

SenseAnalyzeRespond

ActSense

Respond

SenseCategorizeRespond

Disorder

Emergent Good Practice

Novel Best Practice

Emergent Good Practice

Novel Best Practice

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Cynefin Sensemaking FrameworkComplex Complicated

Chaotic Simple

ProbeSense

Respond

SenseAnalyzeRespond

ActSense

Respond

SenseCategorizeRespond

Disorder

Emergent Good Practice

Novel Best Practice

Emergent Good Practice

Novel Best Practice

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@jpaulreed

3 Weird Tricks

1. Every release engineering strategy you deploy must to be:- Complexity-informed- Accounts for the entirety of the system (systems thinking)

- Address human factors

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Human Factors?

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3 Weird Tricks

2. If you[r team] is not involved in some sort of continuous improvement, you should be worried.

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3 Weird Tricks

3. If you[r team] is not working on a continuous delivery pipeline, you should be worried

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Bullish on Release Engineering

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Questions?

J. Paul Reed www.jpaulreed.com Twitter: @jpaulreed

www.release-approaches.com Simply Ship. Every Time.