As Agile and DevOps continue to challenge the status quo and improve business outcomes, large companies need to identify how to scale these practices across large, complex systems composed of hardware, firmware, and software. The ability to iterate and deploy faster allows companies to adapt to changing needs, reduce cycle time for delivery, increase value for money, improve transparency, and leverage innovations. An industry-wide misconception is that this form of rapid iteration is only for software or small applications and systems. For large cyber-physical solutions, software is only one part of the value stream leading us to consider the implication and the application of DevOps principles across the entire end-to-end flow from idea to delivery. In a previously published DevOps Enterprise Forum paper from 2018, Industrial DevOps: Applying DevOps and Continuous Delivery to Significant Cyber-Physical Systems, we described a set of principles that development organizations can use to bring the power of DevOps to the build and maintenance of large-scale, cyber-physical systems such as vehicles, robots, complex medical devices, defense weaponry, and others. We introduced the term “Industrial DevOps” to expand the definition of DevOps in order to enable significant, cyber-physical system development programs to be more responsive to changing needs while also reducing lead times. This guidance has helped to establish the feasibility of using DevOps practices to more efficiently build, deploy, and maintain some of the world’s most important—and most complex—systems.

In this presentation, we take the original guidance concept of Industrial DevOps, eight supporting principles, and the subsequent definitions one step further, by applying the principles in the context of a hypothetical example using autonomous cars and then relating it back to those governing principles. Our intent is to help readers better understand the applicability and need for Industrial DevOps in different solutions, beyond those that are strictly software. The bodies of knowledge that inform Industrial DevOps principles and practices include DevOps, Lean manufacturing, Lean product development, Lean startup, systems thinking, and scaled Agile development. We’ll describe guiding practices that can be used to leverage the learnings from DevOps and scaled Agile developments to address the challenge of building these complex cyber-physical systems in a more efficient and more effective manner.

Industry lead and cycle times for delivering significant cyber-physical solutions—systems such as robotics, warfighting, transportation, complex medical devices, and more—are insufficient to meet the increasing demands of our customers. As the size and complexity of cyber-physical systems increase, the visibility of the work items and activities in the value stream decrease, compounding the problem. Additionally, many large-solution providers are organized around functional areas and apply traditional, sequential, stage-gated development methods, resulting in multiple handoffs and delays. The net result is usually slow time to market, quality issues, cost overruns, and solutions that are not fit for their intended purpose.

Robin Yeman and Suzette Johnson both work for large government contractors where it has been imperative to scale DevOps and to optimize practices for delivery across software, firmware, and hardware. They will discuss best practices obtained from lessons learned across many complex systems.

As the adoption of Agile DevOps has been steadily growing over the years, many organizations have been taking a proactive approach to prepare for the changes needed for success.  This means building our people and organizations with the skills and resources they need to be successful and working with our customers and users for improved collaboration to enable transparency. We have worked to provide our teams with the tools and infrastructure to enable continuous flow of value.

What do legacy organizations need to transform from Horses into Unicorns? Are there constraints in government programs not regularly seen in commercial industry? Are there commonalities across these organizations that others can learn from to support this journey? 

Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman are both leading large Agile transformations at different companies with growing implementations of DevOps on large and small scaled programs. While there is not a single pattern to move large legacy organizations to DevOps, it’s amazing the similarities found across two different companies. Through multiple collaboration opportunities they have found similar effective practices and lessons learned.  Join Robin and Suzette as they provide an interactive discussion around the proven practices for large scale transformation, the challenges they have experienced, and the amazing similarities of two Agile DevOps journeys. Their discussion focuses on activities that have been implemented to cultivate teams and build the necessary skills for this transition, to build the infrastructure that enables a DevOps environment, to improve the value stream and extend the mindset of change across the organization, and ways to measure success.

 Specific techniques: Cultivating teams, Building the infrastructure, Change in practices across the value stream/organization, Measures of Success

 Metrics: Reduced Cycle time for Feature delivery; Reduced Mean Time to Repair; Increase in test automation with improved quality; increased delivery of value, Increased transparency for stakeholders

As an experienced Agile SME working in the government space I have had the opportunity to see changes in the types of requests for delivering products and services to our customers. However there are still a number of challenges in being able to successfully deliver business value to our stakeholders. Robin will describe multiple scenarios based on real business cases of the different types of challenges seen as well as provide recommendations for change to improve collaboration, cycle time, and ultimately business outcomes.

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