Applying Dickens to DevOps

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” Charles Dickens introduction to A Tale of Two Cities.

At times I have used the above phrase to describe the spectrum of feelings present during a DevOps journey. There are incredible things that are happening by some of the leading, innovative teams. Things like reducing the time to run a test suite from hours to minutes. Or going from deploying once every 2-3 months to deploying 2-3 times a week or daily. Or being able to reduce the lead time of a story from creation to deployment from months to days.

But at the same time, there remain challenges such as over governance of change control requiring more manual escalations. Teams being interrupted by countless meetings. Requests for infrastructure changes that could take weeks to be accomplished due to manual and high ceremony processes. Or the inability of a team to make and promote their own database changes and instead having to submit them to a central team of DBAs who have way too much work in progress (WIP) to respond quickly to the new requests.  

I got the idea for this title from from John Willis (noted DevOps author) who speaks and writes about Deming and how Deming's thinking is at the core of the DevOps philosophy particularly regarding Systems Thinking.   For those not familiar with Deming, I would encourage you to research his history including the famous "Red Bead Experiment". I believe many of the non-value added work done in large enterprises can be categorized as an example of a red bead experiment (e.g. multiple levels of estimation). Deming's "Out of the Crisis" remains the classic read on Lean and Continuous Improvement principles.

John gives an amazing talk called “From Deming to DevOps”. So not wanting to be a complete copy-cat, I decided to see what Dickens might have to say and found the quote above very applicable.  I was introduced to Deming's concepts at Bell Labs in the 80s. It is not surprising that Deming would be present in the culture of Bell Labs given that his cohort Walter A. Shewhart worked at Bell Labs from its foundation in 1925 until his retirement in 1956. At Bell Labs, the concepts of PDSA (Plan/Do/Study/Act) and continuous improvement were so embedded into the culture, I would say it was in the air that we breathed.  But developing this type of continuous improvement culture is difficult to do without a safe and sound foundation of support. It also requires both patience and persistence since the journey is not a linear one and is filled with potholes and snares along the way.

So while Shewhart and Deming certainly paved the way with concepts that are now central to Lean and DevOps thinking, perhaps Dickens back in 1859 also had a glimpse into the future of our industry. Let's hope the selfless heroes that lead these transformations have the courage of Carton without having to suffer quite the same fate.

See my talk on this subject from the 2018 DevOps Enterprise Summit.

image from tommorrowsreflections.com