DevOps Culture and Practices

• DevOps is a mindset shift from the heavily siloed environments of old, where each team or individual perform their assigned task as a cog in the machine to culture of collaboration, shared responsibilities, shared learning, shorter cycles, and faster feedback.

• The transition to DevOps is a process of changing the culture of an organization from one of individual silos to a culture of collaboration and communication.

• To successfully transition to DevOps, you must first understand your current system's flow and seek ways to increase it. Flow is a measurement of the time it takes from requirement identification to when that value is delivered to the customer, internal or external.

• The key cultural impacts of DevOps are making the work visible and reducing batch sizes.

• Value stream mapping is a process that helps identify the steps in a system that take the longest time and the steps that need to be improved.

• The goal of value stream mapping is to improve the flow of information and to reduce the batch size of work that flows through the process.

• The feedback loop in value stream mapping aims to increase information flow from right to left in the flow, allowing us to detect and remediate errors early when their impact is smaller.

• The key cultural aspect of the feedback loop is the blameless postmortem after an incident is mitigated.

• DevOps prompts us to not place blame on individuals or teams but to look deeper when incidents occur.

• High trust culture recognizes that we are all lifelong learners and learn from both success and failures, like trying new foods to figure out what we like and dislike.

• We learn through experimentation. Is there some risk that we try something and we hate it? Yes. But there's also a chance to find our new favorite food.

• As we align this to DevOps, looking at our flow and measuring our key metrics, we are ready to start experimenting to see what helps us improve our flow, key metrics, or both.

• We should approach these experiments scientifically and state what we want to test, how we plan to try it, and how we will determine.

• Unfortunately, this often shows up as some percentage of time each week that is blocked for both experiments and improving the system.

• In a low-trust team, if experiments are allowed, the results are typically only shared for successes, if they are shared at all.

Culture is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. In a low-trust team, if experiments are allowed, the results are typically only shared for successes, if they are shared at all. High trust culture recognizes that we are all lifelong learners and learn from both success and failures, like trying new foods to figure out what we like and dislike. We learn through experimentation. Is there some risk that we try something and we hate it? Yes. But there's also a chance to find our new favorite food. As we align this to DevOps, looking at our flow and measuring our key metrics, we are ready to start experimenting to see what helps us improve our flow, key metrics, or both. We should approach these experiments scientifically and state what we want to test, how we plan to try it, and how we will determine. Unfortunately, this often shows up as some percentage of time each week that is blocked for both experiments and improving the system. In a high-trust team, if experiments are allowed, the results are typically only shared for successes, if they are shared at all.