Fork me on GitHub
#ask-the-speaker-track-1
<
2021-10-06
>
Slackbot13:10:13

Reminder: Day 2 is starting now – opening remarks and then plenary talks! Join the conversation in #ask-the-speaker-plenary.

Ken Sipe14:10:40

lá maith @jpetoff moin @cleng great talk!

👋 1
Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:10:32

Excited to welcome @sanjeev.sharma and @john.comas who will be presenting, The Art of Platform Engineering

Topo Pal16:10:53

Watching @sanjeev.sharma and @john.comas

❤️ 2
Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear16:10:18

The statement about how it’s not self-service if you need to get a dozen approvals to do it rings so true!

👍 4
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:57

Story of our lives… process trumps technology every day

❤️ 3
💯 2
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:32

Timely session @sanjeev.sharma, @john.comas - as most of the enterprises are figuring out Platform as Product , Platform Engineering. Thank you for sharing Truist work here, much appreciated.

👏 1
Topo Pal16:10:40

Continuous Compliance - that's 2C's right there

6️⃣ 1
🙃 4
Ferrix Hovi - Principal Engineering Avocado - SOK (S Group)16:10:36

Continuous, Continuous, Continuous, Continuous and... :drum_with_drumsticks: Continuous

😂 2
🌀 1
Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear16:10:27

reminds me of the five D’s of dodgeball: Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge. 😂

1
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:24

Continuous Continuity

🎉 1
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:28

Never silo your DBAs 🙂 (I always that it is the other way)

Vaidik Kapoor (Speaker) - Technology Consultant16:10:58

What are some resources to learn about implementing CD practices with database changes?

👏 1
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:41

Happy to chat with, we introduced some capabilities here. Not completely CD 🙂

Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear16:10:24

I’ve found OctopusDeploy to have some good blog posts on this topic to start out with: https://octopus.com/blog/why-consider-database-deployment-automation Some general concepts there that aren’t necessarily tool specific.

👏 1
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:36

We use octopus, Flyway DB

👍 1
Ganga Narayanan16:10:53

STARR - with 2 Rs 🙂

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:15

DBAs! I love the Phoenix Project deployment story: “uh oh, we’re 1 hour into a 9 hour database migration, that should have taken 15 minutes!“” 😆

7
Topo Pal16:10:12

Standardization of Tools!!! I am fine with this as long as I have my tools in that list! 😃

😆 3
😅 3
Brian W. Spolarich - Cal Poly16:10:38

This can become a "religious war". Introducing the idea of Tech Management to my org (Tech Governance as a term didn't resonate)

👍 1
Brian W. Spolarich - Cal Poly16:10:19

But basing the conversation in economics really helps (what is the TCO and value prop of a new language/framework/etc. vs leveraging an existing one?)

👍 1
Ganga Narayanan16:10:07

"I don't care what color the car is, as long as it is black!"

2
Chris16:10:21

TCO and ROI maybe, if TCO is lower on a single tool (likely) but induces costs of delay which are magnitude higher, there may be a case for breaking standardization, no?

Brian W. Spolarich - Cal Poly16:10:53

yes! the point is that there should be a business case. tech selection is a business choice

👍 1
Chris16:10:56

Agreed, just witnessing the risk of selection driven by some infra team in charge of tools and financial rationalization (aside the fact that in quite some case there may not be additionnal license cost with free stuff).

👍 1
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:43

@sanjeev.sharma - question- What functions covered in "Platform Engineering" and "Platform DevOps Automation" - did I miss that poinit?

Ferrix Hovi - Principal Engineering Avocado - SOK (S Group)16:10:17

Standardizing tools to about a 100 instead of a 1000... I'm game... but one toolset to rule them all is a perpetual modernization every 10 years... just like before DevOps.

Topo Pal16:10:43

10 years???

Ferrix Hovi - Principal Engineering Avocado - SOK (S Group)16:10:35

YMMV... we are still not rid of COBOL but nobody does Scala anymore.

🎉 1
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:47

That Pendulum keeps swinging back and forth every few months, and even more faster as we add more options

jeff.thomas16:10:17

platform as a product is like any product, refactoring is a norm

jeff.thomas16:10:38

microservices over monolith

Sanjeev Sharma16:10:58

@jeff.thomas And like any product needs to have a lifecycle

👏 2
Ferrix Hovi - Principal Engineering Avocado - SOK (S Group)16:10:26

I guess the question is: How many simultaneous enterprise architectures is enough?

Sanjeev Sharma16:10:43

@lbmkrishna Platform Engineering covers the whole stack, so to speak - the slide I showed earlier. DevOps Platform is the App delivery pipeline part of it

BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:53

so CI/CD and associated plugins/process automation?

Ganga Narayanan16:10:59

As we move from Dev to Ops, our tools narrow... - sounds like a 5-lane highway narrowing down to 2

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:56

@john.comas This is so fantastic — understanding the nature / consequences of changes.

👏 1
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:17

@ganga.narayanan Or like the TVA pruning variants (sorry, Loki reference)

❤️ 3
Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:34

@john.comas This story about ecommerce order management system is one of the best I’ve ever heard!!! I LOVE THIS!! 😆

Topo Pal16:10:07

@john.comas LMAO

Topo Pal16:10:32

DevOps comes with Free Stuff!!!

1
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:41

@sanjeev.sharma - I will be keen to understanding more about the "GRC" part of it both - Platform Engineering and DevOps Platform Automation. What tools/automation put in place to satisfy those requirements?

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:45

Customer orders product; customer cancels orders; order cancellations get stuck in queue; orders fulfilled and sent to customer, but never charged for it. Very bad business model. HAHA! I LOVE IT, @john.comas!

😂 3
3
👏 1
Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:35

Danger of slow feedback loops; wow, that should go into a future edition of Phoenix Project. We’ll call it the Comas disaster. 🙂 @john.comas

3
👍 2
Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:56

“Build the platforms not for the bank we’re now, but the bank we’re planning to be.” — @sanjeev.sharma

👏 3
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:03

@lbmkrishna The GRC toolset is still immature - every tool has their own implementation of how to do GRC. We need to get to standardized policy-as-code

👍 2
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:23

My reflections are "Provisioning VM on-prem: 2 weeks; Provisioning VM on Enterprise Cloud Platforms: 6 weeks"

Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear16:10:23

I love the TVA analogy! Pruning the timeline. 😂

💯 1
David Roth16:10:49

it's good unless you are a Variant 😉

3
💯 1
Brian Smith16:10:57

we are all variants, we just don't know it.

Sanjeev Sharma16:10:19

One man’s variant is another man’s mainline

❤️ 3
Topo Pal16:10:21

Amazing test automation at Truist @sanjeev.sharma @john.comas

👏 2
Virginia Laurenzano NSA16:10:06

self-service automated tests. I am jealous.

❤️ 2
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:26

I still see that Excel rules the GRC space - @sanjeev.sharma,I agree we need to get better

😬 1
Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:04

@rothdm Variants! 😆 this morning, I watched the presentation that @emoshmosh gave at GitLab conference last year — I think the birth of the amazing DevX story was initially due to a heavily modified GitLab instance, created by an enterprising dev team. 🙂

🎉 2
Topo Pal16:10:37

bookmarked!

Eric Mosher, NSA16:10:14

Thanks for the plug @genek! I'm honored! 🙂

❤️ 3
Virginia Laurenzano NSA16:10:12

To further brag on @emoshmosh - he's taken on the role of DevX Technical Director. Yay!!

🙌 2
Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair20:10:24

Congratulations! I loved the stories you told, @emoshmosh!! 🎉

David Roth16:10:17

Excel and PowerPoint rule too many spaces 🙂

Brian Smith16:10:01

But how do I find a better way? I wish there was a better way, i just don't know how to get there.

Brian Smith16:10:46

I h8 PPT but don't know how to get away from it.

David Roth16:10:51

i'd love a drastic measure of removing it from the app catalog

David Roth16:10:58

but sometimes you need a picture to talk to

Brian W. Spolarich - Cal Poly16:10:17

How large is the team building and supporting the platform itself?

👍 3
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:37

We have to go to live dashboards over excel spreadsheets

😲 1
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:16

@brianspo Still early stages of composing the individual services into a true platform

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:14

Thank you so much, @sanjeev.sharma and @john.comas – would you be willing to give us an update next year at DevOps Enterprise? As you said, it’s not every day that a top 10 bank appears out of nowhere!! 🙂 😆

2
❤️ 1
Topo Pal16:10:18

Great presentation @sanjeev.sharma and @john.comas

👏 1
💯 2
Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear16:10:30

Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed see your platform journey.

Sanjeev Sharma16:10:34

Thanks @genek and @tapabrata.pal

❤️ 2
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:49

More updates to come next year, Hint, hint @genek

Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:10:52

Get ready to hear from @jeremy.castle.lvh0 and @ryan.chambers.rse9 from State Farm, presenting Governance, Compliance, and Risk in the SDLC Can Be a Fun Event!

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:58

Woot! Thank you, @sanjeev.sharma!!

❤️ 1
Chris16:10:11

@sanjeev.sharma Quite interesting, may not be able to provide you with this help, as having done it relartively ambrionic maner till now, but interested in connecting as normally at the begining of starting something similar

👍 1
BMK-SECTION6-TransformationArchitect16:10:31

Great topic following GRC & SDLC cc - @sanjeev.sharma, @tapabrata.pal

❤️ 2
Topo Pal16:10:50

Governance, Compliance, SDLC... this must be a fun talk

❤️ 3
🎉 1
Chris16:10:09

Thanks @sanjeev.sharma

❤️ 1
Erika León Ravinez16:10:17

Thanks @sanjeev.sharma for your presentation

❤️ 1
Sanjeev Sharma16:10:21

Would love to connect @christian.lefevre - @sd_architect on Twitter or sanjeev.sharma(at)http://truist.com

Ganga Narayanan16:10:51

Thank you @sanjeev.sharma @john.comas!  Loved the presentation! btw about #3 - I found it a combination of mandates + "build it and they will come" .. very relatable!

Sanjeev Sharma16:10:49

Thanks @ganga.narayanan

John Comas16:10:01

Thank you @ganga.narayanan

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:10:56

“the tons of technology here at State Farm” — 2900 technologists! — @jeremy.castle.lvh0 @ryan.chambers.rse9

Topo Pal16:10:59

Teams named "Delivery Experience" are very common these days. Love it

👏 4
Jeremy Castle16:10:39

We've been fortunate to have State Farm invest in our area.

❤️ 3
Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear16:10:10

That’s great to see another team with Delivery in the name! We are Delivery Engineering here at Columbia. 🙂

👏 2
Jeremy Castle16:10:29

One of my products in the suite is actually called Delivery Engineering too 🙂

❤️ 2
Jeremy Castle16:10:47

They focus mainly on topics like GitOps these days

Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear16:10:15

How’s gitops working out for you? I haven’t had an opportunity to see it in action at a company yet.

Jeremy Castle16:10:26

It's going really well. Our internal k8s and AWS deployments all require it. We've gotten really good feedback from our development community so far.

Ryan Chambers17:10:38

It makes deployments a breeze by following a pattern that all of our developers are already familiar with and using the same tooling that they are working in every day.

Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear17:10:13

Is it a commit for them to their existing code repos or is this more of a separate set of repos that they use to interface with your deployment tooling that’s separate from the code build and packaging?

Ryan Chambers17:10:12

We use different repos that we call config repos...when ready to deploy to production the pipeline will push the changes (terraform, artifacts, etc) to the separate repo. Then a merge request is created and thats what the manager will approve.

Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear17:10:59

Nice! So the config repo handles the metadata about what to deploy without being tightly coupled to the code that built the artifacts. I like that decoupling of the pipelines, I can see the benefits in flexibility that provides.

Topo Pal16:10:34

Yes! Automated Governance!

❤️ 3
Topo Pal17:10:20

@jeremy.castle.lvh0 @ryan.chambers.rse9 if you get time please join today's bof on audit compliance

❤️ 2
Tish17:10:31

is that 25 clock hours or 25 working hours?

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:10:35

This is really great stuff, @jeremy.castle.lvh0 and @ryan.chambers.rse9!

💯 5
❤️ 2
Jeremy Castle17:10:18

Thank you! We are excited to see what we can do with this framework next year and see how we can bring our InfoSec and Risk partners along to automate our governance.

❤️ 1
Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear17:10:16

@jeremy.castle.lvh0 - How large is the delivery excellence team and how does it measure in comparison to the size of the org you’re building these solutions for?

Jeremy Castle17:10:01

Good question. We are about 60 people (including leadership). We have about 7000 IT folks at State Farm. About 3000 of those are in developer/data/infrastructure roles.

👏 3
Jeremy Castle17:10:08

We mainly support the 2000 developers.

Dian Hansen17:10:17

Great talk - thank you!

Topo Pal17:10:22

Great presentation @jeremy.castle.lvh0 @ryan.chambers.rse9

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him17:10:43

Thanks @jeremy.castle.lvh0 and @ryan.chambers.rse9

Derek Bissinger17:10:59

Very informative! Excellent example for everyone!

Joe Waid - Manager, Delivery Engineering - Columbia Sportswear17:10:16

Thank you @jeremy.castle.lvh0 and @ryan.chambers.rse9!

James Tabron17:10:32

Great presentation! I'm curious to know how this framework helps with external audits of your release process? Does it make the audit smoother or is it hard explaining to auditors what's happening and how its addressing risk in the process?

1
👀 2
Jeremy Castle17:10:45

@jtabron That's a really good question. We haven't moved into the mode for our Auditors to start using it. They have looked at our GitOps flow and have been very happy with how they can now look at a single flow to find all the steps in the approval for a change (Testing, Sign off, validation, etc.).

Jeremy Castle17:10:59

We still have some work to do to sell this to our Risk/Auditing folks

James Tabron17:10:12

Thank you. In this framework, can a developer deploy code to production that wasn't tested or peer reviewed? You may have touched on this but I may have missed it.

Jeremy Castle17:10:33

They cannot. We have hard controls in place that stop that from happening. So there needs to be an sign off by a member of leadership before changes can be pushed into production. This framework will allow us to also verify the test artifacts and quality of the change in the future.

Dakota Wandro17:10:25

@jeremy.castle.lvh0 @ryan.chambers.rse9 do you think it would have been as feasible to do this if you were using something other than GitLab for your pipelines? e.g. tight integration between your version control system and your CI system, with approval capabilities baked in, etc?

Jeremy Castle17:10:19

I don't think so. We spent several years positioning out critical web platforms to only allow deployments using pipelines. This gave us an easy choke point to start firing off events. We had also started wrapping our developer tools in CLI's as well, so that became a natural event point as well.

👍 1
Ann Perry - IT Revolution18:10:00

😎 Back from the break, we welcome @jorge.castro,who will share: ENSUCKLOPEDIA OF DevUps - An improvised glossary to help us for understanding of What DevOps should not be or become!!! 😎

👍 1
Meaghan Dop18:10:34

Always appreciate an IT Crowd reference

👍 1
Hayden Smith (Anchore)18:10:49

@jorge.castro is changing the presentation game. This is awesome.

👍 1
❤️ 1
Jorge Luis Castro Toribio18:10:19

Thank you for your kind words team : )

Braxton (LogDNA)18:10:20

Sith ChatOps Analyst Love it ha ha

👍 1
Jorge Luis Castro Toribio18:10:46

I do hope you enjoy the talk and have fun #continuousfun

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:34

CICDCF -- expanded pipeline.

👍 1
Ben Larabie18:10:58

"Shitty manual stuff" - @jorge.castro you are my hero

👍 2
Pedro Jordan18:10:35

a superstar basically.

👍 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:49

20 years EXP and all DevOps Certs, And PHD in DevOps and be personable..

👍 1
Lucas Whaley18:10:32

"Ops losing responsibility" ha

👍 1
Gray O'Byrne18:10:47

This is hilarious and oddly helpful

👍 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:32

seems like missing a section on Blame Shifting.... : ) it is not DevOps it is the old ways and the failure to adopt.... 🙂

👍 1
Gray O'Byrne18:10:59

Only problem is I can't tell what the actual advise is in between all the satire

👍 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:53

Game Approach == like Squid Game - you lose you die...

👍 1
Malcolm McAlpin18:10:22

Thank you!!

👍 2
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:51

@jorge.castro great job.. made me happy

❤️ 1
👏 2
👍 1
Pedro Jordan18:10:01

thank you for make us think on this !

👍 1
Gray O'Byrne18:10:09

i think it's important to look at all the counterpoints to these ways of working as well. This was insightful

👍 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:51

I guess I am up next for Track 1...

Robert Printz18:10:57

I had not seen the periodic table of devops tools before. Interesting. https://digital.ai/periodic-table-of-devops-tools

👍 1
Jorge Luis Castro Toribio18:10:39

Thank you all team, I do appreciate your words. At the end, something that I want to foster is about DevOps is about people also so besides CI CD CT CM and CStuff lets also practice Continuous Fun : )

👍 3
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:42

@robert.printz new elements being discovered every day..

👍 2
Ann Perry - IT Revolution18:10:00

And now, we welcome our friend, @mr.denver.martin who will share: Tales From the DevOps Loop: 4 Teams Approach to 1 Common DevOps Framework

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him18:10:58

HI Everyone, Just one of my many Tales from Implementing DevOps at 3 different companies with different size team..

👍 2
Jorge Luis Castro Toribio18:10:08

Thank you very much all. Hi team, I think I have some of your in my Linkedin but I would like to have you all so we can keep the learning and sharing experience after the event, I will be honored if you can add me https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgeluiscastrotoribio/ Thank you and keep safe : )

Jorge Luis Castro Toribio18:10:23

You are going to rock @mr.denver.martin

John Awesome Rowe - Best Buy19:10:06

@mr.denver.martin How big of an organization was this? Was this a small team as a part of a larger org inside of a larger org?

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:32

Company was 1K - 4K employees.

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:12

The Ops teams for Network and Platform were small compared to the other teams...

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:12

Apps Support was a lot larger, the Dev Teams were ever larger..

Meghan Glass - PrdMgr Best Buy19:10:38

I am excited to hear about how you were able to change these command and control/task assignment leaders' approaches

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:31

Unfortunately, they were not able adopt new ways of working, they had to be encouraged to find a better fit outside the company...

John Awesome Rowe - Best Buy19:10:00

So instead of changing the people, you changed the people

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:22

We tried to change the way they worked first, as it is better to grow from with in, however in this case we had to replace... but one of the replacements for team 2 was a promotion from with in.

Glenn Wilson, Author of DevSecOps19:10:39

I’m curious to know how security interfaced with these teams

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:31

InfoSec had been the Team of NO, but during this time they became partners and work to figure out how fix what we had and were involved later as partners at the beginning of new works... so it improved over time - due to Leaders asking them to join and they even attended BPMs later and gave great input.

👍 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:40

I hope to make Tales from the DevOps Loop a series... so I can make a note to add InfoSec notes in a future talk...

❤️ 1
👍 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:47

I am also open to partnering with other implementers to do talks with...

👍 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:27

I can also provide the template from Team 4 for promoting the learning of new technologies and show the company was supporting their upskill.

Meghan Glass - PrdMgr Best Buy19:10:12

Awesome! Can you share it here?

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:01

pulling it up to attach here..

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:21

copy of the template message

❤️ 1
Will19:10:55

Our team is looking for tips and tricks for running effective blameless post mortems. Any thoughts on what works to get people focused on the problem vs the people involved?

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:51

yes, hit me up, <mailto:mr.denver.martin@gmail.com|mr.denver.martin@gmail.com> we can set up a time to talk.. it was important for us..

Will19:10:13

Thanks, will do

Meghan Glass - PrdMgr Best Buy19:10:44

Thanks for sharing your examples!

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:58

yeah, that was a major win for us,,, it was hard to keep it blameless, more than willing to share how we did that... I will also note to do a deeper dive in future Tale video...

Ann Perry - IT Revolution19:10:01

📣 Shout out to our next speakers, @rajat.sud and @donalmeida2 here to present, Got Score? Scaling DevOps Adoption 📣

Glenn Wilson, Author of DevSecOps19:10:01

Thank you @mr.denver.martin A great example of real world adoption into a sceptical organisation. Certainly provides a blueprint for others to follow

Don Almeida19:10:02

Hello everybody.. Rajat and I am here to support the Track 1 conversation

Robert Printz19:10:11

@donalmeida2 How many people work in your DevOps Center of Excellence?

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:54

We're actually quite a lean team, supporting as many as 300+ engineers

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:16

Would the members of DevOps CE come from with in the company or were they hired from outside and a new net add?

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:27

A little bit of both - we did purposefully build the CoE and funded it via some baseline vehicles

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:17

Was to move from within seen as a promotion? or was it a lateral?

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:52

Definitely triggered a lot of interest - enough for us to be selective 😉

Don Almeida19:10:11

We have a CoP that Rajat Runs where we bring together engineers from the delivery teams and help them implement the practices

Don Almeida19:10:25

we could only scale with the help of delivery teams.

Don Almeida19:10:44

we did hire from the outside as well…

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:32

Are you also doing SRE? I see that SRE comes after DevOps is stable... so curious if you have added that level and how you staffed that group..

Don Almeida19:10:13

We have another team that looks at SRE

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:05

Okay, so not part of the DevOps CoE - another group...

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:30

I live for the day when DevOps is not Unicorn but a Thoroughbred herd.

Bryan Finster - Defense Unicorns (Speaker)19:10:09

Gamification. 👍 Were there any teams that had trust issues about it?

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:23

We did make available all our raw data so folks could do their own analysis and 'buy in'

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:11

Any bonus points for helping other teams? t

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:58

It could be good to give extra points if they share knowledge and help another team...

👍 2
Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:41

Great thought - will have to think about quantifying that though 🙂

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:01

Good approach to help get buy in...

🙏 1
Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:36

Do you let them buy Company Swag with Points?

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)20:10:39

Given that it was baked into all our performance goals - they had the liberty to choose how best to spend their (demonstrable) improvement ;)

Ryan Taylor, Application Architect, Axim Geospatial19:10:39

Do you think the scoring may de-incentivize teams without a competitive spirit or that may feel they aren't empowered to change?

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:21

Excellent question. We did have teams saddled with legacy technology - and we did realize some of this just served as a FYI for them...

👍 1
Bryan Finster - Defense Unicorns (Speaker)19:10:03

Do you give a score for improving or only current metrics?

Ryan Taylor, Application Architect, Axim Geospatial19:10:51

Yeah, it sounds really interesting but I know some that for some of my teams this could have an undesired effect, particularly for those groups I mentioned (folks the prefer not to be competitive, folks feeling unempowered).

Bryan Finster - Defense Unicorns (Speaker)19:10:40

This males sense as part of an overall strategy where they are told they have permission to fix things. 🙂

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:48

The capabilities scored were intrinsically woven into our self-serve platform

Bryan Finster - Defense Unicorns (Speaker)19:10:02

We did something similar at Walmart. Talking to @troy.magennis a couple years ago he suggested gamifying improvement as well.

Bryan Finster - Defense Unicorns (Speaker)19:10:47

So, “you may not be amazing, but you’re headed that way”.

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)20:10:22

Exactly - the score spawned an improvement action plan - that clearly spelt out the "what/how"? We, at the CoE peppered in the "why".. While the team was empowered to decide the "when" in line with their priorities (some gentle nudges helped ;))

Scott Heaberlin19:10:49

Did the scoring / adoption approach yield observations on the capabilities offered/used themselves? For example, maybe gaps or impediments for specific technology platforms?

Don Almeida19:10:04

yes. we had working sessions with the teams to improve their scores

Don Almeida19:10:19

we also made it part of the performance gaols

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)20:10:22

@scott.heaberlin, just realized that you are a part of the BCBSA family 🙂 We do have some novel tech stacks which didn't quite fit the mold off the bat - though the principles of DevOps still apply. Once designed, they were roped into the scoring.

🙌 1
John Ediger19:10:42

Wondering if you've thought about how this approach contrasts with recommendations in "Sooner, Safer, Happier" to not measure activity, or "how DevOps or Agile" are you, vs. basing paths based on context of each team and their impediments, and measured by outcomes?

👍 1
Don Almeida19:10:18

we will look into that good points

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:36

Interesting..measuring activity was just a means to an end - to provide some actionable data and shake the inertia and challenge the status quo

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:28

And provide some quantifiable data points that our leaders could use to facilitate conversations with their team members... its a part of our overall strategy of being more data-driven

John Ediger19:10:45

I would love to discuss this further sometime. While this is easier to measure, I have found more benefits from having teams own their path and not try to meet a general score based on implementing a checklist of practices. Maybe there is an option to score outcome improvement percentages, vs. what practices are put in place.

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)20:10:36

@halfmoondad, happy to connect. Yes, we are coming to the realization that it is better to trend (outcomes) rather than compare. However, the question was trend what? And this provided us some basis for deciding what to measure - and then how to improve it...

Don Almeida19:10:46

yes. we had working sessions with the teams to improve their scores

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:47

@ryanewtaylor what if you approached it like a combined points approach like fundraisers where the combined teams points everyone wins something like 1/2 day off or something...

Ryan Taylor, Application Architect, Axim Geospatial19:10:49

yeah, that may work well. I myself prefer environments that are more collaborative than competitive, even across teams. Think actors in a play vs sports teams. Everyone works towards a shared goal vs having competition between teams.

Denver Martin, Dir DevSecOps, he/him19:10:18

Thanks for presenting @rajat.sud and @donalmeida2

👍 1
Erika León Ravinez19:10:51

@rajat.sud thanks for sharing, i hay a few questions: 1) what has been the success of having an adoption score rating? 2) what kind of measurements do you for pipeline usage, capabilities, practices? 3) is this measurement is complementary to having a maturity level that focuses more On practices and tool usage? 4) can you Share with us the type of questionnaire you do to get these scores?

Carlos Chang19:10:58

We are doing something similar at RBC. @rajat.sud would love to connect to share ideas!

Rajat Sud (DevOps Evangelist - SBPASC, an affiliate of CareFirst) (Speaker)19:10:20

@eleonravinez thanks for the questions. Hope these responses shed more light 1. Scoring has been quite well-received. It provides an actionable piece of information that can be trended. 2. We have as many as 15 measurements right now - from build automation and stability, deployment automation and stability across environments, Securitization, Code Quality, test automation, etc. 3. The measurements when aggregated to the product or portfolio did facilitate questions about maturity - the tools usage was part of that - but the key is that it facilitated conversations about team practices 4. We graduated from questionnaires to automatically eliciting this data from the usage of our tools, and then applying applying some calculations (per our methodology) and updating in real time

👍 2
Slackbot21:10:25

Reminder: The plenary sessions are starting again in 5 minutes. Start making your way back to your browser and join us in #ask-the-speaker-plenary to interact live with the speakers and other attendees. https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/UATE4LJ94/F01D34MC2KS/image.png