Learning Curriculum: Based on the All Day DevOps Culture Track

Learning is a continuous journey and I have been looking into what DevOps is since 2011–12. At a local Meetup in London, I had a very good introducer on the subject, who brought it down to: DevOps is about change. And his recommended reading list had quite a few management books about Leading Change.

Culture plays an important role in DevOps and DevOps change, and that’s why I have been helping the All Day DevOps team put together the track for the last two years.

Every person takes away something different from the same talks and I personally have taken away different things from reading the same blog multiple times or listening to same speakers present slightly different versions of the same talk. As we understand some concepts better what we take away changes. I recently listened to the Phoenix Project again after many years and having learnt a lot more about lean, theory of constraints and WIP management, what I took away from the book was very different to what I took away in my early DevOps journey.

I present a list of talks from this year that can help you on your journey. It may be that you have to revisit a few of these once you have learnt more using other mediums.

All the talks can be found at: http://alldaydevops.com/ondemand.

Intro to DevOps

The DevOps Journey  - How To Get There Painlessly: Marc Cluet presents an introduction to DevOps with a view to educate the audience on how to go about a DevOps transformation, covering the basic principals that are key to DevOps. He recommends behaviors and practices that are useful for a successful transformation/change effort learnt from his time consulting in this space.

Heralding Change  - How To Get Engineers On Board The DevOps Ship: Anton Weiss talks about what it takes to get engineers interested in DevOps. Open Collaboration and information sharing is very important.

Value Stream Mapping & Shared Outcomes  - The Path To Collaboration & Winning As A Team: Marc Cluet touched on starting a transformation journey with knowing where you are and vision. Now, in this session, Courtney Kissler presents examples of how value stream mapping helps with getting that understanding to the organization by targeting the right areas for improvement.

Getting There - The Journey to Government DevOps: Navin Vembar from the GSA (which is a mid-sized government agency, ~16,000 people), talks about the agency's journey of how to help a large organization baseline, measure and share the improvement to be able to focus on the right areas for improvement at a project/application level and as a whole organization.

What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us There: Mirco Hering shares with us how management practices have evolved and in the current world of DevOps how a change to management is required to enable the organization to usable software to users effectively.

Test Transformation

60,000 Tests In Six Minutes: Creating A Reliable Pipeline, Eliminate Flaky Tests & Deploy Safely But Quickly: One of the pillars of DevOps transformations is continuous delivery and to get to continuous delivery well requires a non-flaky fast test suite. Getting there isn’t easy - Martin Woodward takes us through the journey Microsoft took in achieving this. A lot of people do not consider testing/QA as something that needs to be part of a DevOps transformation. It is essential to rethink testing as an engineering activity, shifting testing left.