At the ADP East conference, Jez Humble made the case for continuous delivery and DevOps.He described a simplistic view of an organization where you’ll have a business department that comes up with a new product and hands-off requirements documents to the development department. After a couple of years, the development team finally completes the application and hands it over to the operations department so that they can provide the application to the customers.
This cycle from conception to production takes a couple of years and the success criteria are based on on time, on schedule and on budget. Very few organizations go back to analyze the total life cycle cost of the product vs. the real customer value it is generating. According to the Standish group, about 60% of features delivered end up being never or rarely used. Since the business does not have a mechanism of delivering quickly and validating their ideas through early customer feedback, they instead try to forecast and predict the future by guessing what their customers will want. And since acquiring funding is hard and in order to ensure project success, they end up cramming the requirements documents with all sorts of features that cover all imaginable scenarios. This increases scope which in turn delays the project and further lengthens the conception to production cycle.
Agile addresses this problem by focusing on delivering working software early and often and avoiding the big batch death spiral approach to software development. However, even by adopting Agile, the organization needs to align the goals of these 3 departments. The business is being measured on innovation; development is being measured on throughput while operations are being measured on stability. These are competing goals that can impede Agile adoption as departments treat each other as rivals instead of partners.
Well what if these goals where reversed? What if development is being measured on producing stable, production ready applications while operations is being measured on throughput? In my next post I’ll explore how Jez believes DevOps makes this happen by addressing culture, collaboration, automation and measurement. Stay tuned…
Adapted from Enterprise DevOps: Breaking Down the Barriers between Development and IT Operations @ADP East 2011
