Applying Dickens To DevOps

By Carmen DeArdo

Elevator Pitch

This talk will focus on the ebbs and flows and highs/lows of a DevOps journey using Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities as a backdrop. It will provide a realistic message that is hopeful and positive, of what one may expect to encounter and how leaders of these transformations can persevere and thrive.

Description

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” Charles Dickens introduction to A Tale of Two Cities.

DevOps Transformation journeys are not a linear path to success.

At times I have used the above phrase to describe the spectrum of feelings present during a DevOps journey. There are incredible things that are happening by some of the leading, innovative teams. Things like reducing the time to run a test suite from hours to minutes. Or going from deploying once every 2-3 months to deploying 2-3 times a week or daily. Or being able to reduce the lead time of a story from creation to deployment from months to days. But at the same time, there remain challenges such as over governance of change control requiring more manual escalations. Teams being interrupted by countless meetings. Requests for infrastructure changes that could take weeks to be accomplished due to manual and high ceremony processes. Or the inability of a team to make and promote their own database changes and instead having to submit them to a central team of DBAs who have way too much work in progress (WIP) to respond quickly to the new requests.

This talk will focus on the ebbs and flows and highs/lows of that journey using Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities as a backdrop. It will provide a realistic message that is also hopeful and positive, of what one may expect to encounter and how leaders of these transformations can persevere.