done

May 03 2015

What done REALLY looks like in devops

Steve Ropa blogged about What done looks like in devops , I must say I respecfullly , but fully disagree with Steve here.

For those of you that remember I gave an Ignite about my views on the use of the Definition of Done back ad #deovpsdays 2013 in Amsterdam.

In the early days we talked about the #devops movement partly being a reaction against the late friday night deployments where the ops people got a tarball with some minimalistic notes and were supposed to put stuff in production. The work of the development team was Done, but the operations team work just started.

Things have improved .. like Steve mentions for a lot of teams done now means that that their software is deployable, that we have metrics from them, that we can monitor the application.

But lets face it .. even if all of that is in place there is still going to be maintenance, security fixes, major stack upgrades, minor application changes, we all still need to keep the delivery pipelines running.

A security patch on an appliction stack means that both the ops and the developers need to figure out the required changes together.

Building and delivering value to your end users is something that never ends, we are never actually done.

So let me repeat ,

"Done is when your last enduser is in his grave"
In other words, when the application is decomissioned.

And that is the shared responsability mindset devops really brings, everybody is caring about the value they are bringing to their customers, both developers and operations people. Thinking about keeping the application running. And not assuming that because a list of requirements have been validated at the end of a sprint we are done. Because we never are...

BTW. Here's my original slides for that #devopsdays Amsterdam talk.


Jul 03 2013

Done Ignite

Last month I gave an 5 minute Ignite talk at #devopsdays Amsterdam.

To summarize .. it was a rant against people that think that the end of a sprint their work is done, an idea they might have gotten from a broken definition of done.

Both the video recording and the slides are embedded below.