Designing a DevOps Dependency Diagram to Decide Development Direction

location_city Melbourne schedule Jul 30th 12:15 - 01:00 PM AEST place EN101 L100 people 28 Interested

So you walk into a new company, get the lay of the land and then realise, crap! Their development processes are like they were design by a bunch of first-year uni students doing a group project.

There is no DevOps to speak of. There are snowflake servers everywhere. Their git branching strategy is unmanageable. They run tests only every 3 or 4 releases. Their deployment is manual and different for each release. The have no real alerting.

Ok. Take a deep breath! Calm down.

So much to do, but where to start? The business has produced a list of improvement actions, but those actions are focussed around fixing the symptoms of the problems, not solving the root cause. The business does not understand that the path to DevOps improvement is complex and each task has many inter-relations and dependencies.

This is the problem that I faced about a year ago. To overcome this, we went through a process of defining all of the DevOps tasks we could think of and mapped them into a dependency diagram. This diagram was useful to communicate both internal and external to the team.

In this case study, I’ll go through the process to design the dependency diagram, but also our progress through the diagram one year later.

 
 

Outline/Structure of the Case Study

A case study which will go through the process of designing the dependency diagram, and then walk through how we actually progressed through the diagram over the period of a year.

Learning Outcome

A deeper understanding of the complexities of improving the DevOps processes of software engineering teams, and some concrete ideas of how to go about doing this.

Target Audience

People who want to understand a bit more about how to improve the DevOps capability of a team.

Prerequisites for Attendees

A rudimentary understanding of the process of building software and getting it into production.

Slides


schedule Submitted 4 years ago

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