2016-04-26

Delivery of Things World 2016 - Day 2

... continuing with my notes from the second day:
  • From oil tankers to speedboats by Jonathan Smart, Head of Development Services at Barclays (keynote):
    • They had 400 internal standards (lots of regulation) and used waterfall.
    • They are currently in the process into an agile organization. 800+ teams working with agile practices, 3x more stories finished than a year before. He showed a graph indicating a strong correlation that apps being deployed more often lead to less production incidents.
    • Cultural changes may take years.
    • Don't scale agile. Descale the work first.
    • Shu Ha Ri.
    • Disciplined Agile used as scaling framework (here and here you can find more information about this framework).
    • Implement communities of practice.
    • Story telling, training and coaching are essential.
    • Leadership training.
    • Head for technical excellence.
    • Agile architecture (no monolithic architecture).
    • DevOps is a practice, not a product.
    • They implemented a simple control tool: Answer 20 questions (before: hundreds), the number of control points were reduced from 7 to 2.
    • Blending not clashing (one size does not fit all): Be agile in adoption, sometimes different speed in adoption is required.
    • Embrace continual change.
  • Transforming application delivery for Continuous Innovation by Jonny Wooldridge, CTO at The Cambridge Satchel Company (keynote):
    • "It's all about the code."
    • Heavily invested in increasing excellence & craftsmanship with their move towards agility.
    • Legacy applications can impede moving towards agility.
    • Define and decouple your "pace layers".
    • Watch out for corporate equilibrium: Enterprise equilibrium (wrong technology, wrong people, wrong frameworks, wrong 3rd party suppliers) tends to drive DevOps adoption backwards.
    • Build new initiatives the right way (reduce complexity, reduce legacy code).
    • Kill dependencies.
    • Focus on APIs.
    • Don't create new legacy (i.e. don't use legacy approaches just because they are quickly available, you have to actively invest into agile). 
  • Accelerating DevOps adoption: Patton and Gandhi by Stephen Fishman, Senior Director, Platforms & Services at Autotrader (keynote):
    • Never be ashamed to ask for excellence.
    • Religiously strive for collegiality.
    • How to persuade people being skeptic about agile transformations:
      • Step 0: Assume positive intent.
      • Step 1: Empathize.
      • Step 2: Point to higher ground.
      • Step 3: Wait.
      • Step 4: Repeat.
  • World Café Sessions (smaller groups of about 20 people discussed a certain topic for about 30 minutes; we had some good discussions about the integration of developers and ops people, the introduction of continuous delivery and agile methods):
    • Analyzing Continuous Delivery: What are the advantages - big and small - that you can look forward to once you have Continuous Delivery in place? by Lars Bendix, Professor of Software Engineering, Department of Computer Science at Lund Institute of Technology.
    • Ericsson Eurolab: World of DevOpsCraft by Almudena Rodriguez Pardo, Senior Scrum Developer, ICT Development Center Eurolab Aachen at Ericsson and by Norma Acevedo, Product Deployment Manager at Ericsson.
    • Don’t build a golden prison – Dos and Don’ts for working with DevOps by Udo Pigorsch, DevOps System Manager at Axel Springer SE.
    • Continuous Quality and Continuous Delivery: How to have both by Tobias Kutzer, Senior Solution Architect at Worksoft.
    • Data-Driven DevOps to Improve Velocity, Quality, and Impact / Using Continuous Delivery to build products customers actually use by Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk.
  • Screwing Up For Less by Stephen Hardisty, Director of Engineering at Rocket Internet (keynote):
    • If people feeling comfortable, they get careless (see "risk homeostasis", also here).
    • Embrace feature toggles.
    • Make problems more obvious (i.e. visibility, wall screens).
    • Automate all the things.
    • Managers: No shouting! (I.e. no blaming.)
    • Reduce risk by using technologies that are already established in your organization.
  • Balancing the 3 pillars of DevOps - Managing people, process, and technology change to grow a DevOps culture with Stephen Hardisty, Director of Engineering at Rocket Internet, Jonny Wooldridge, CTO at The Cambridge Satchel Company and Dave Nolan, CTO at AppearHere (panel discussion):
    • Topics addressed:
      • Hire people with the right mindset.
      • Establish culture and mindset.
      • The right tools.
      • Trust in the change.
      • Gain speed and reduce time to market.
Panel discussion

2016-04-25

Delivery of Things World 2016 - Day 1

Today, Delivery of Things World 2016 - a conference about DevOps and continuous development - started in Berlin. It spans two days, and about 300 people participate. I attended the following sessions on the first day:
  • DevOps and Moving the Elephant by Chris Gargiulo, Head of DevOps & Enterprise Service Platforms at Maersk Group (keynote):
    • You have to start communication and work against fears.
    • Continuous integration and continuous delivery are starting points for the journey towards trust in DevOps. He showed numbers of an example concerning decreased build times due to automation.
    • First rule of DevOps: There's no crying in DevOps! I.e. you have to stand throwbacks and resist switching back to the old manual processes, learn from failures and watch out for potential improvements.
    • Define a mission goal, adopt changes incrementally, quantify the results and celebrate success accordingly.
  • Leading organisations that don‘t need leading by Mark Rees, former COO at E-POST Development (keynote):
    • Their development units consist of several DevOps teams, each DevOps team in turn consists of a number of developers, a QA engineer and a delivery lead - kind of a mixture of a scrum master and a product manager.
    • Responsibility and leadership always came up in discussions.
    • Leaders should act as enablers and provide an environment for teams to become confident about taking responsibility for yet unexplored fields.
    • Leaders should coach their teams in the beginning and then step back, delegate and provide support.
    • Don't manage your teams, lead them!
  • SecDevOps: How can we create cultural change to bridge this gap between security and DevOps? by Ben Hughes, Network Security Manager at Etsy:
    • A typical DevOps pyramid: 10 developers, 1 ops person.
    • Typical SecDevOps pyramid: 100 developers, 10 ops persons, 1 security person.
    • Establish security champions: Join security conferences, hang around in relevant chats etc.
    • Etsy does security bootcamps: Join a couple of other different teams for some time, then return to your home team (you are now well connected and got the security word spread).
    • Security team culture:
      • "Don't hire a**holes."
      • Be approachable.
      • Be transparent.
      • Be humble.
      • Act blamelessly.
      • Create a culture where people report strange things happening rather than pretending everything is fine.
    • "If you make security hard, people won't use it."
    • Get everybody in your company/department to be "part of" your security team. Security is not something someone else cares about.
  • Buy vs Build by Nishan Subedi, Senior Engineer at Etsy:
    •  A nice tour through the tools they built:
      • Virtual Madness (set up and manage development VMs).
      • deployinator (deploy code changes).
      • supergrep (tail production server logs).
      • StatsD (metrics collector).
      • morgue (for blameless postmortems).
    • The main ideas behind these tools:
      • Encapsulate ideas.
      • Provide reasonable defaults.
      • Make users feel comfortable due to transparency.
    • Technology is a product of the culture that builds it. The Etsy culture consists of:
      • Just Ship! (I.e. enable frequent deployments of small changes leading to continuous deployment.)
      • If it moves graph it!
      • Optimize for developer happiness.
      • Don't be an a**hole.
      • Engineering with a capital "E" - "E" as in empathy.
    • A new hire always does a "First Day Deploy":
      • Learn from what you see (and do).
      • Make implicit explicit. No knowledge hidden in a small number of brains.
    • Etsy strongly considers itself a learning organization.
  • Generali‘s journey to reduce release and maintenance downtimes by 90% by Torsten Rehfisch, Scrum Product Owner at Generali:
    • They decided to use XL Deploy for deploying web applications into a IBM WebSphere landscape including every dependent artifact and configuration which is needed to run a web service.
    • After a description of their evaluation process these results were shown:
      • Deployment landscape: 6 XL Deploy instances (3x for development/integration, 3x for UAT/pre-production/production).
      • Each XL Deploy instance is set up via Puppet.
      • Jenkins is used for build.
      • They gained speed, confidence, transparency and repeatability.
  • From Need to Speed - How to successfully setup a DevOps transformation by Robert Michel, IBM Cloud Solutions Technical Sales at IBM:
    • Levels of DevOps adoption to increase delivery speed:
      • Agile development/continuous integration.
      • Continuous delivery.
      • Continuous deployment.
      • Continuous operations.
    • Start fresh with a new project, start small, and think of "developer first" and "cloud first".
  • Evolving to Continuous Development: a skill set example by Sebastian Ehrich, Software QA Engineer at ebay Kleinanzeigen and Manuel Aldana, Senior Development Manager at ebay Kleinanzeigen:
    • Iterating often leads to a smaller change set per single deployment/iteration, which leads to less risk, better traceability and faster feedback.
    • Key success factors:
      • Culture.
      • Mindset.
      • Communication & collaboration (e.g. create communication/collaboration spaces in order not to broadly disturb people, implement open meetings where people can decide on their own whether the meeting is of interest for them).
      • Visibility and spreading the knowledge (e.g. metrics on wall screens).
      • Automation.
    • They are mainly looking for people fulfilling the t-shape model.
    • Product teams are self-containing, i.e. each product team consists of a mix of required people like developers, QA people, designers, operations people etc.
    • Use kanban (due to its inherent continuous improvement).
  • DevOps for leaders by Adam Lukas Urban, Head of Order Management Development at 1&1 and Tim Schuppener, Head of Development Webhosting Infrastructure & Content at 1&1:
    • Invention and adoption cycles get shorter and shorter (examples: steam machine, computer, mobile phone).
    • Faster shipment is required.
    • Collaboration (communication, transparency) and common responsibility are essential.
    • CAMS.
    • First day deployment (like they do at Etsy).
    • Pair operations (like pair programming).
    • Hackathons, team events, socializing/communications areas.
    • For leaders/management:
      • Define values & targets.
      • Give time & space.
      • Performance will go down. Don't start measuring too early.
      • Retrospectives are the key to continuous improvement.
  • Software is eating the world by Henk Kolk, Chief Architect at ING (keynote):
    • The bank is IT, and the IT is the bank.
    • ING's journey from an organization heavily driven by processes (e.g. there were times when 64(!) documents had to be written before getting the clearance to start coding) to an agile one.
    • Their reorganization lead to 180 full DevOps teams (i.e. operations people and developers in one team).
    • Later they integrated the business people, too, to build product teams being completely responsible for a product. With that they got rid of 2 management levels.
    • Results of their journey:
      • IT drives the commercial strategy.
      • IT is a value driver.
      • Hiring the best talents.
      • Building as the way to understanding.
      • Line drives the changes.
      • Products and services.
      • People.
  • The Rationale for Continuous Delivery by Dave Farley, Author of Continuous Delivery (keynote):
    • The scientific method:
      • Characterization.
      • Hypothesis.
      • Deduction.
      • Experiment.
      • Repeat!
    • Iterative development processes are more successful than traditional ones like waterfall.
    • Lean thinking:
      • Deliver fast.
      • Build quality in.
      • Optimize the whole.
      • Eliminate waste (unnecessary variations, overburden, wasteful activities).
      • Amplify learning.
      • Decide late.
      • Empower the team.
    • Continuous delivery leads to shorter cycle times and thus enables iterative processes.
    • Continuous delivery motivation:
      • First principle of the agile manifesto.
      • Logical extension of CI.
      • Holistic approach to development.
      • Every commit creates a release candidate.
      • "Finished" means released into production.
    • Continuous delivery gains:
      • Repeatable and reliable process.
      • Automation.
      • Everything under version control.
      • If it hurts, do it more often.
      • Build quality in.
      • Done means released.
      • Everybody is responsible for the release process.
      • Continuous improvement.
    • The Google build process shows that CD scales:
      • A single monolithic repository.
      • All tests run on every commit.
      • More than 100 million tests are run per day.
    • Amazon does one deployment every 11.6 seconds, each deployment hits 10,000 servers.
    • The DevOps transformation at the HP LaserJet firmware team e.g. resulted in 8x the capacity for innovation.

2016-04-24

Nach dem Schneeschauer ...

... erstmal auf einen Kaffee in die Trinkhalle im Stadtpark - danach lecker Burger und Fußballgucken in der Foodpecker Kitchen

2016-04-10

Norderelbe und so

Abstecher zur Oldtimer Tankstelle
Chillen an der Wasserkunst Kaltehofe ... inkl. Museumsbesuch
Nur ein Teil der Insel ist für Menschen begehbar, der Großteil ist ein Naturpark und nicht begehbar

Die Lange Nacht der Museen

Polizeimuseum: Draußen Fahrzeuge zum Anfassen, drinnen ein sehr interessanter Vortrag über Faserspurenanalyse
Blick vom Energieberg Georgswerder auf die Industrie in Veddel
Sammlung Falckenberg: Werke von Raymond Pettibon
Blick in das ehemalige Fabrikgelände der Phoenix-Werke, das heute die Sammlung Falckenberg beheimatet - lecker Essen gab's vom Meatwagen
Zum Abschluss eine Fotoausstellung in den Deichtorhallen