The last couple of months I wrote 8 blog posts over what I learned from Microsoft doing DevOps:
- Moving to Agile & the Cloud
- Planning and alignment when scaling Agile
- A day in the life of an Engineer
- Running the business on metrics
- The architecture of VSTS
- Changing the story around security
- How to shift quality left in a cloud and DevOps world
- Deploying in a continuous delivery and cloud world or how to deploy on Monday morning
I loved writing these blogs and I got some great feedback so I hope it helps some people on their DevOps journey.
The following table really sums up what DevOps and Cloud did for the VSTS team:
| The old world | The new world |
|---|---|
| 4-6 month milestones | 3-week sprints |
| Horizontal teams | Vertical teams |
| Personal offices | Team rooms |
| Long planning cycles | Continual Planning & Learning |
| PM, Dev, Test | PM & Engineering |
| Yearly customer engagement | Continual customer engagement |
| Feature branches | Everyone in master |
| 20+ person teams | 8-12 person teams |
| Secret roadmap | Publicly shared roadmap |
| Bug debt | Zero debt |
| 100 page spec documents | Specs in PPT |
| Private repositories | Open source |
| Deep organizational hierarchy | Flattened organization hierarchy |
| Success is a measure of install numbers | User satisfaction determines success |
| Features shipped once a year | Features shipped every sprint |
| If you recognize yourself in the issues on the left you can absolutely find some inspiration in how to solve your issues in the blog posts mentioned above. Feel free to leave a comment or contact me on Twitter so we can continue the discussion and make sure that as many organizations as possible can benefit from everything the new Cloud and DevOps world offers. |