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aclairefication

~ using my evil powers for good

Category Archives: DevOps

Keep your options open

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by claire in Automation, DevOps, Experiences, Training, Uncategorized, Unconference, Volunteering

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Tags

CFP, conference, DevOps, event, proposal, serverless, Wardley mapping

In DevOps, there’s a pervasive theme of automating toil, which many would say contains all of testing. I’m just gonna say it: I come from the testing community. We’re people who constantly look for things we haven’t seen yet, who collaborate across roles, who explore the unknown, and who care about doing the right thing. Does that characterization surprise you? Yes, testing is complex enough to be a viable career and not just a thing we do until we can script it for a computer to execute.

So when I reached my limit of “X is going to kill Y” (in this case, DevOps and the testing profession), I finally went for it and joined a DevOps team as an agile tester. I wanted to see for myself that DevOps was the cultural sea change that would make my job role obsolete. If giving up my vocation was the right thing to do, I wanted to be ready with a deep understanding of the value of the new practices and to embrace the mindset shift. I wanted to be ready to bring others along with me on my voyage.

Free electron
Free yourself, electron!

When I attended DevOpsDays Atlanta 2018, I didn’t know what the community would be like. Sure, I’d helped to review their proposals as part of the program committee, but who would I meet who would change me for the better? It was my first time hanging out at an event for people who might identify as “operators” instead of just “developers.” Would they welcome me, a person without any operations background?

Inclusive collaboration wasn’t just the theme of the conference: attendees and speakers shared their authentic selves and wholly embraced it.

Although my discernment of future direction is ongoing, I see as much diversity of thought in DevOps as in agile. The afternoon unconference was my favorite experience! This format is less structured, as you might expect from the name, allowing for free-flowing conversations that address the most current burning questions of the attendees. I found operators wrestle with similar collaboration conundrums. My questions and concerns found ready listeners and new proposed solutions (in addition to new questions!). This diversity of thought helped to open up my perspective on what is possible.

Collaboration with people from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints is a competitive edge. It’s also the right thing to do. We want to keep our professional and organizational options open. Distinct perspectives provide a greater ability to handle the breadth of competitive situations we face. We need new voices and different perspectives to make change possible.

I’m particularly excited about the possibilities this year in bringing 3 communities together! Whether you’re someone looking to refine your role in the context of today’s accelerating software delivery cycles or just curious about how much DevOps, serverless, and (Wardley) mapping enthusiasts have in common, this year’s event is for you!

Our call for proposals ends February 28th (that’s today, procrastinators!), so there’s still time to share the unique experiences that only you can bring, whether through a 30 minute session or a 5 minute ignite talk. If you prefer to attend and then propose topics on the fly like I do, the afternoon unconference provides that space for emergent value.

Let me assure you that constant learning isn’t easy! Change is hard – and worth it. I expect the supportive environment I’ll find at DevOpsDays Atlanta / serverless days Atlanta 2019 / Map Camp 2019 is exactly what I need to just keep swimming. We could all use some help staying afloat.

Agile2018 links

07 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by claire in Agile, Agile2018, DevOps, Personas, Publications, Speaking, Training

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Live sketch doodle for @aclairefication’s session on #DevOps – inspired by @sketchingsm. #Agile2018 pic.twitter.com/YC873O2D92

— Ankur Saini (@sainiankur) August 7, 2018

Here are some sources to dig in more after my Agile2018 session Everything You Wanted To Know About DevOps But Were Afraid To Ask:

Slides & Handouts

Abstract:
As a career software tester, I’ve heard rumors DevOps culture will put me out of a job, so I took a job testing for a DevOps team. I’m new to DevOps, but aren’t we all? What matters most is our teams’ intentional decisions to grow our DevOps practices along with our development community.
Join me as I share my experiences blending disciplines, companies, levels of experience, and differing expectations as a member of efficient and effective delivery teams. I’ll describe common cultural and interpersonal problems I experienced while transforming a cross-functional agile team dogfooding a DevOps implementation.
Whether you’re into development, operations, testing, customer support, or product ownership, you’ll leave with concrete strategies for improving your DevOps working relationships to keep the technology running smoothly. People factors strongly affect your DevOps technical outcomes, so optimizing your flow includes improving your people practices.
Don’t feel afraid to ask about DevOps anymore!

Learning Outcomes:

  • The people factors that strongly affect your DevOps technical outcomes
  • How to blend teams from different companies
  • To sort through process and role differences
  • Apply the Agile mindset in support of DevOps

 

Other DevOps sessions from Agile2018

AppSec in a DevOps World

DevOps Metrics 101

Software & Pipeline Architecture for Continuous Delivery

Principles of Self-Service Infrastructure

Evolutionary Cloud Infrastructure

The Twelve-Factor Pipeline

“Three Ways” of DevOps

Creating Chaos … Engineering

Blameless Continuous Integration

Continuous Delivery & Testing

Bonus: old presentation from Agile2017: DevOps Explained

Sources I found useful when preparing for this talk:

Books

book Accelerate

book The Phoenix Project (business parable), which calls back to Industrial Engineering business parable The Goal

book Lean Enterprise

book Continuous Delivery

book The DevOps Handbook

book The Site Reliability Workbook (free download right now!)

eBook: Katrina Clokie’s A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps

Podcasts

DevOps Defined

 

Audio

Beyond the Phoenix Project audio series

 

Videos

7 min intro

DevOps: Who Does What?

DevOps is Dead

Deep dive into container security w/Elissa Shevinsky

All Day DevOps 2017

 

Events

DevOpsDays Atlanta

 

Blogs

BizDevOps

Chef DevOps

DevOps is Dead: Rugged Enterprise DevSecNetQAGovOps

Bridging the Gap between Dev & Ops

IT Infrastructure Agility

DevOps Silo

DevOps user stories

Westrum model + organizational culture & safety

Deployment pipeline

High Performance Practices [PDF]

Continuous Testing

DevOps Odyssey

DevOps for Execs

Notes from The DevOps Handbook + More notes + Even more notes

Small-scale DevOps

DevSecOps

DevOps 2018

What is DevOps? + a different What is DevOps?

CALMS framework + Framework & practices

DevOps conversation

 

Specifically to dig into background for the DevOps personas I created:

What kinds of variables are useful to represent in personas? Persona-based testing + Persona variables + Pragmatic personas

Gartner on DevOps persona

Presenting pipeline data for DevOps personas

User stories for DevOps

SRE vs DevOps

DevOps Revolution

Who Does What? Part 1 + Who Does What? Part 2

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