The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 66

DevOps and Processes
One common mistake I see in almost every engagement that involves legacy processes
is a lack of focus and analysis of those legacy processes before proceeding with auto-
mation. As a result, enterprises are automating waste and not realizing the benefits of
agility they were expecting. This is often the result of silos and mismatched incentives
across those silos. Developers will work in their own silo and implement CI/CD. They see
great improvements in both time and quality of their build process but often see little to
no change to their time to market metrics. Why is that? Because there are 20 to 30 years
of legacy change control processes created in the era of biannual releases that have not
been addressed.
I have seen numerous instances where red tape can mire the process for weeks or
months prior to being able to perform an automated build, followed by more weeks and
months of red tape in order to promote the code to production after the automated
build. Yet teams still focus solely on perfecting CI/CD.
If you have ever read Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, you will have learned that working on
the wrong bottlenecks does not improve the overall flow of a system. Instead it moves
the bottleneck to another part of the system. If enterprises only implement CI/CD with-
out performing a value stream assessment of the complete system, they will only move
bottlenecks from the build process to another part of the system, thus never achieving
the desired agility. Engineers must think about the system as a whole instead of just
focusing on automating a component of the system. System thinking can be a foreign
topic to a silo-based organization.
Another area we look at is the SDLC practices. Enterprises planning to move to frequent
deployments need to embrace lean principles and move away from traditional waterfall
or immature scrum approaches. Governance is another important area. The old method
64 | THE DOPPLER | SPECIAL EDITION 2019