Fear of the Bus: Devops and Docs

By Heidi Waterhouse

Elevator Pitch

Move fast and don’t break anything!

Devops is under a particular kind of pressure that could be solved by better documentation, but they don’t have time to DO documentation. This is a proposed solution.

Description

Do you wake up in a cold sweat when you think about what would happen if one of your devops people were to suddenly vanish, or win the lottery? Could you carry on? Can anyone on your team take vacations to cell-phone dead spots?

Devops is such a dynamic and flexible part of an organization that it is the absolute hardest thing to get documented, and the place where it really makes a difference to burnout if you have managed the miracle.

I’m not here to tell you how to use confluence better. We’re going to have to do much more nimble, flexible documentation methods. I’m going to use post-its, commit messages, slack emojis, and crowd suggestions to show you how to do good-enough documentation without slowing your organization down.

Notes

There are a lot of places that devops and agile overlap, and I think it’s important to understand how you can make both of them stronger without necessarily hiring a writer (although people should)