Talk: Bringing Product thinking to DevOps
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Speaker:
Marcel Britsch
Talk description
Title:
Bringing Product thinking to DevOps
Short synopsis:
With the advent of the DevOps movement we have seen an immense improvement in software delivery by closely linking software engineering with deployment and infrastructure. We have also seen an increase in complexity of options: what is needed for one organisation is not what another organisation requires or can even stomach. By adding Product Thinking to DevOps we add the final missing piece to ensure that we meet not only technical needs but wider business expectations. Ultimately our goal is to provide participants with a view of where and how product thinking can add value to DevOps and make related deliverables more valuable and suitable within the context at hand.
Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):
Neha and Marcel have both been in a number of situation where clients asked us to ‘get them a CI/CD pipeline’ and teach them ‘DevOps skills’ and ‘transform them to continuously delivery’. If we follow the standard literature it seems easy: we start with coding best practices, implement a CI/CD pipeline, then test and learn to ever more shorten deployment cycles and increase stability and performance of our system. What became apparent is that while there is a generic understanding of what ‘good looks like’, at detailed level this leaves many question open: Questions such as should we use Bash or PowerShell, are short lived branches ok, what environments do we need or what tooling do we need to meet regulatory requirements for security and would we want to automate this? With DevOps, and more specifically delivery pipelines and infrastructure automation, being new as they are, clients often ‘don’t know’ which can leave DevOps easily confused and uncertain which approach to take, which solutions to choose. Having worked in business analysis and product definition for many years, Marcel and Neha feel that what is missing to many DevOps endeavours is recognition of the user: the user in a wider sense than just Dev and Ops, but the business at large: Product Owners who expect software delivery at speed, Devs who expect repeatable software deployment, End-Users who want to use reliable and performant software, Regulators who expect software to be audited, compliant and secure, and their Operational counterparts within the organisation who want to provide all this with easy, cost efficiency, minimum risk, and that scalable and ‘evolvable’. Following the outline a generic CI/CD pipeline this talk will identify stakeholder touchpoints and respective needs and expectations. Building on this we discuss, using real world examples, what the challenges at the various touchpoints are, be this the provision proof of regulatory compliance of every release in case of the medical industry, or test and scan automation to ensure no credit card details are stored in unencrypted form at any point in time in the case of a payment services provider. We will also provide examples of how, theoretically equally valid solutions options within context can be the very wrong choice in another. Ultimately our goal is to provide participants with a view of where and how product thinking can add value to DevOps and make related deliverables more valuable and suitable within the context at hand.
Max size: 5000 chars
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