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Besieging the Mountain

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Abstract

After a difficult adjustment period, some of the efforts that the team has put into a “shift left” movement – including breaking up their siloed QA team – starts to bear fruit. Both their defect rate and release velocity numbers show significant improvement after a slight sag early on. Even better, that vital connection to Ben’s customers and stakeholders seems to be thawing somewhat. Putting quality first instead of speed, it turns out, enabled the team to deliver both. But how will the team address its biggest hurdle of provisioning environments reliably and consistently?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Behind Human Error,” Sidney Dekker, David Woods. CRC Press, 9/30/2010. ISBN-13: 978-0754678342, ISBN-10: 0754678342. Etsy and other companies has mentioned this book and its discussion of First Stories vs Second Stories many times.

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  5. 5.

    “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable,” Patrick Lencioni. Jossey-Bass, 4/11/2002. ISBN-13: 978-0787960759, ISBN-10: 0787960756.

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  7. 7.

    “Morgue: Helping Better Understand Events by Building a Post Mortem Tool,” Bethany Macri. DevOpsDays.org, Vimeo, 10/18/2013. https://vimeo.com/77206751 . How and why the Morgue postmortem tool was created at Etsy. This tool is publicly available on GitHub; see https://github.com/etsy/morgue .

  8. 8.

    “Practical Postmortems at Etsy,” Daniel Schauenberg. InfoQ, 8/22/2015. https://www.infoq.com/articles/postmortems-etsy .

  9. 9.

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  10. 10.

    Interview of Seth Vargo by Dave Harrison, see Appendix.

  11. 11.

    Interview of Ryan Comingdeer by Dave Harrison, see Appendix.

  12. 12.

    “Etsy’s Winning Secret: Don’t Play The Blame Game!”, Owen Thomas. Business Insider, 5/15/2012. http://www.businessinsider.com/etsy-chad-dickerson-blameless-post-mortem-2012-5 .

  13. 13.

    “Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture,” John Allspaw. Code as Craft / Etsy, 5/22/2012. https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ .

  14. 14.

    “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” Charles Duhigg, 2/25/2016, NY Times Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html .

  15. 15.

    “Would You Fold Pocket Aces Postflop In This Spot?”, Martin Harris. PokerNews, 5/8/2017. https://www.pokernews.com/strategy/would-you-fold-pocket-aces-postflop-in-this-spot-27861.htm . The source for the pocket aces fold story comes from this article.

  16. 16.

    “When is it OK to Fold Aces?”, Malcolm Clark. PokerTube.com, 6/22/2016. https://www.pokertube.com/article/when-is-it-ok-to-fold-aces .

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    “Standish Group 2015 Chaos Report - Q&A with Jennifer Lynch,” Stéphane Wojewoda, Shane Hastie. InfoQ, 10/4/2015. https://www.infoq.com/articles/standish-chaos-2015 . From 2011-2015, the number of “successful” vs challenged/failed projects held rock steady at about 29%. Interestingly, the smaller the project was, the greater its chance of success; small projects had a 62% success rate versus only a 2-6% chance for grand/large sized projects

  18. 18.

    “Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale,” Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O’Reilly. O’Reilly Media, 1/3/2015. ISBN-10: 1449368425, ISBN-13: 978-1449368425.

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    “The biggest waste in software development,” Siddharta X. Tools For Agile blog, 3/26/2010. http://toolsforagile.com/blog/archives/260/the-biggest-waste-in-software-development .

  20. 20.

    “Annual State of DevOps Report,” unattributed author(s). Puppet Labs, 2017. https://puppetlabs.com/2017-devops-report .

  21. 21.

    Mike Kwan, Intimetec, interview with Dave Harrison.

  22. 22.

    “Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation,” Jez Humble, David Farley. Addison-Wesley Professional, 8/6/2010. ISBN-10: 9780321601919, ISBN-13: 978-0321601919.

  23. 23.

    Interview of Ryan Comingdeer by Dave Harrison, see Appendix.

  24. 24.

    “Stop Getting Stuff Done After You Said You Couldn’t,” Donovan Brown. donovanbrown.com, 3/17/2017. http://donovanbrown.com/post/Stop-Getting-Stuff-Done-After-You-Said-You-Couldnt .

  25. 25.

    “The DevOps Adoption Playbook: A Guide to Adopting DevOps in a Multi-Speed IT Enterprise,” Sanjeev Sharma. Wiley, 2/28/2017. ISBN-10: 9781119308744, ISBN-13: 978-1119308744

  26. 26.

    Mike Kwan, Intimetec, interview with Dave Harrison.

  27. 27.

    “Making Matrixed Organizations Successful with DevOps: Tactics for Transformation in a Less Than Optimal Organization,” Gene Kim. IT Revolution DevOps Enterprise Forum 2017. https://itrevolution.com/book/making-matrixed-organizations-successful-devops/ A good discussion on how and why to form a cross-functional team, starting with the leadership level.

  28. 28.

    Interview of Jon Cwiak by Dave Harrison, see Appendix.

  29. 29.

    “DevOps Culture (Part 1),” John Willis. IT Revolution, 5/1/2012. https://itrevolution.com/devops-culture-part-1/ This is an extremely influential and powerful article; we turned back to it many times.

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© 2019 Dave Harrison and Knox Lively

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Harrison, D., Lively, K. (2019). Besieging the Mountain. In: Achieving DevOps. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4388-6_4

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