Category Archives: Conferences

Devops, an alternative vision of IT

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For a month I’ve been breathing Devops heavily through the involvement in 3 Devops-related events:

  • A dedicated lab at Devoxx France (Paris) with my fellow Devops Mercenaries – March the 29th
  • A Devops Agile Mëtteg organized on Agile Partner Premices  - April the 11th
  • First day of Devops Days Paris, which I happened to help organize – April the 18th

Let me go through them un-chronologically, in order to make their presentation more logical.

Mindmapping DevOpsDevops Agile Mëtteg

The Devops Agile Metteg was meant as an introduction brainstorming on the concepts surrounding and underlying Devops.

Participants were eager (from what I felt) to learn what Devops is, and were from Dev, QA and Ops teams, with a majority of people from Dev teams.

We tried to build and then to discuss a mindmap of the concepts around Devops.

Some were surprised to see that Devops is neither a “method” nor a set of tools, and I think we all arrived to grasp the fact that Devop is more an alternative prism to existing problems.

That alternative vision helps focusing on extending the benefits of Agile practices (i.e. having Business stakeholders and Development teams focus together on the outcome of I.T. projects) to the whole value stream going from Business stakeholders to Operations, going through Dev teams, QA teams, and Ops teams.

There are definitely tools, practices and possibly methods involved in the mix, though they are not Devops tools, practices and methods, but more existing tools compatible with a Devops approach and vision.

That precise Agile Mëtteg was designed as a brain storming with some guiding support, and would have deserved (after a little internal retrospective) even a bit more guiding given the short amount of time we had and the numerous topics to cover.

Though I think the spirit was good and the feedback from participants ever interesting!

Definitely something to try again, with the same and additional participants in the mix!

Devops Mercenaries at Devoxx France

That exercise was a bit different, because my fellow Devops Mercenaries and myself had already presented a 3 hours introduction to Devops in 2012 at Devoxx France, and the workshop we did this year was a follow-up to that introduction, therefore targeted to an audience already aware with the basics and the specifics of what Devops is (and is not ;) ).

Some of my fellow mercenaries (Henri Gomez and Dimitri Baeli) and I did a workshop for a whole day at Devoxx France on March the 29th.

The purpose was to get participants to express what they felt Devops is, or what they wanted to learn from it, and then elaborate from that, through the discussion and completion of a mindmap (soon to be published on Devops Mercenaries), and through the presentation and discussion of practical examples of practices and tools.

We pushed a bit further what we had done the year before, which was building an end-to-end application with continuous provisioning, deployment and monitoring.

This year we also added automatic and visible acceptance and performance testing to our sh4rewithme application (in our java-based example using Thucydides and Gatling).

The purpose here was to extend the ownership of all the aspects of an application to all the stakeholders involved. Everybody can work on and try out acceptance and performance scenario, without a specific environment, and therefore contribute to their quality.

That example brought interesting discussions around topics such as Devops culture, native packaging, distributed configuration tools, responsibilities and roles.

If we have the honor to be chosen again, this was an exercise we’d like to try and reproduce again.

Once again in a retrospective exercise, we’d probably keep the discussions more focused, but we had to try it this way in order to gauge how to channel discussions properly.

This was definitely fun and we can’t thank enough the participants, while hoping they had as much fun and got away with as much new knowledge as we did.

Devops Days Paris

I had the honor and joy to participate and help organize a bit the first Devops Days occurrence organized in France.

I only participated in the first day of this 2 days conference, and it was already very full of very interesting feedbacks.

The morning’s presentation were very good, though I must admit a few days after their occurrence, I’m still failing to find a specific highlight on a given one.

We’ve heard about such diverse topics as how to handle Customer feedback, how to turn developers’ mind to devops, how to think about products more than about projects in enterprises, and how ops concerns can improve development.

The highlight of that morning were the ever-entertaining and very fun ignite talks. Those talks are 5 minutes talks, with slides changed automatically every 15 seconds. An interesting and difficult exercise :)

It definitely highlights (to the extreme) the need for few words, pictures, and no bullet points in slides ;)

The highlight of this day (content wise, see further on for the remaining fun) were the open spaces. Topics were chosen by participants and put on a board for voting, and then various open spaces were created in order to discuss elected topics. The discussions were too deep and numerous to sum up though I’ll try and sum up my feelings globally at the end of this post.

The day ended with a gratifying Diner on a boat on the Seine (with a beautiful view of the Eiffel tower), and an open bar somewhere in Paris.

What did I get from those events

Those events were very different and fulfilling in very different ways.

After the very specialized discussions of Devoxx, the Agile Metteg allowed me to try and get back to the basics, and to summarize what Devops means.

Devops days was an open parenthesis on what the Devops angle brings to thinking the I.T. landscape, and I must say that parenthesis is not yet closed for me ;) .

What Devops is

To begin with, what it is not: a product, a method, a person, or a team.

Those things can (or should) be devops-compatible though.

Devops is more a cultural shift and a different vision and approach to solving already known issues and therefore can seem a bit overwhelming and even “buzzwordy” because it seems everything can fall into its scope ;) .

In the end, few things are really devops compatible in our current I.T. landscape (except if you work in a startup or in a big web 2.0 company). I.T. is often divided in very distinct parts separated by cultural and administrative fences.

The purpose of Devops is to diminish the need for those fences, but not to turn everybody into an anonymous Devops profile. Operation people should still have operations responsibilities and roles, though they should share common responsibility of some things with Customers, Devs and QA. The same goes for other specialized profiles.

The main things that should be shared by all these people are visible dashboards, common live metrics, issue diagnosis and the products themselves. This is not exhaustive, and the most interesting bit is how to put this up, though these are the things I currently think can make up for a good start of a Devops initiative.”

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Back from Global Scrum Gathering Barcelona 2012

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After practicing Scrum during four years as a Scrum Master and Scrum facilitator for new teams, Scrum Gathering Barcelona 2012 was my first Scrum gathering.
While registering to the event, my motivation was more driven by my curiosity than anything else.
But when the event approached, questions came into my mind, questions like “what will I find there?”, “what will be the outcomes of this kind of global event?”. And then I started to build expectations. And one of them was that I wanted to find out what were the trends for Scrum for the next few years.

Scrum Gathering Barcelona 2012 has been the biggest Scrum gathering ever, with 330 participants coming from more than 30 countries, and 6 session tracks in parallel.

Session categories were :

  • Art of Coaching (18 sessions)
  • Unleashing Innovation (6 sessions)
  • Taking Care of Business (6 sessions)
  • Engineering Wars (6 sessions)

Sessions I attended:

  • Opening keynote by Michael Feathers – The feature trap
  • Creative collaboration by Paul Goddart (Art of Coaching)
  • Product roadmaps to bring the gap between vision and backlogs by Jason Tanner (Taking care of business)
  • Radical innovation: The six-week open space experiment by Richard Kasperowski (Unleashing innovation)
  • Solution Focused Retrospectives with Scaling Constellations by Dr. Ralph Miarka & Veronika Kotrba (Art of coaching)
  • Leap with a New Team Through Play! by Danijela Divac & Elaine Bulloch (Art of coaching)
  • Not Your Mother’s Agile Transformation by Katrina Bales & Keely Killpack (Art of coaching)
  • Closing keynote by Heinz Erretkamps & Gregory Yon

+ many many sessions at the 3-day Open Space!

Because I am more “team” focused, I attended a lot of sessions related to the Art of Coaching, but it was not so difficult because half of the sessions were in this category ;o).

About my expectations

After two days of gathering, I was puzzled. Already two days of conferences and still no trend to bring back home. And then I realized that there was a hidden message in what I saw and what I heard during two days: OK, Scrum is used by everybody here at the gathering and what they already learned in Scrum trainings is not enough to reach success.
To succeed with Scrum, you need more tools, more practices. And the sessions reflect that: how to help teams and especially Product Owners being more creative, how to better manage retrospectives while using solution-focused activities, how to better manage an agile transition, how to better build a Product roadmap by using Innovation games, how to get people taking more responsibilities by using tools like Open Spaces, etc…

Scrum used alone is not enough to succeed. It’s a starting point, but you will have to tackle various problems in your daily work by using tips and tricks!

Outcomes
I come back home with a huge collection of new “ice-breaker” activities, sort of serious games, to put people in the right mindset before starting a “serious” activity, because everything in a team is about people and their interactions. And it is already a lot!
And the real first outcome was to meet passionate, great people.

Then a lot of people at the conference found in the closing keynote the trend I was expecting since the beginning. I did not.
Let me explain. The closing keynote was about an experiment of Scrum in Automotive R&D (at Johnson Controls in a team that was designing car seats). Maybe it was a great feedback session, but in my opinion, it is not a new era for Scrum, even less because Scrum adoption in this industry follows the same path than in IT: we start using Scrum in a project only when the boat is already sinking! Not sure it is a good start to become mainstream …

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De retour de Lean Kanban France 2012

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Cédric, Yann et moi avons représenté Agile Partner les 18-19 octobre 2012 à la première conférence Lean Kanban France à Paris. Cette conférence était la première étape d’une série d’événements européens sous le patronage de la Lean Kanban University. Elle comptait certains des speakers les plus emblématiques du domaine, tels que David J. Anderson, Don Reinertsen, Jim Benson, Dave Nicolette, Laurent Morisseau… La communauté Kanban est donc particulièrement active et prête à conquérir le monde !

Mais cette conférence était particulière pour nous à plus d’un titre.

La version française du livre Kanban enfin disponible !

D’abord parce qu’elle coïncidait avec la sortie officielle de la version française du livre “KANBAN” de David J. Anderson que nous avons traduit en 2010-2011 puis finalisé avec l’aide d’Alexis Nicolas en 2012. Un grand merci à lui pour sa ténacité qui a permis de faire aboutir ce projet. C’est avec une certaine fierté que toute l’équipe de traduction (Yann Gensollen, Pierre-Antoine Grégoire, Jérémy Rousset, Véronique Olive et Sylvain Chery) voit aujourd’hui se matérialiser le résultat de longs mois d’effort et nous vous encourageons à vous procurer cet ouvrage de référence.

Notre retour d’expérience Dennemeyer : de Scrum à Kanban

Ensuite, nous avons eu l’opportunité de partager un retour d’expérience concernant une équipe avec laquelle nous travaillons depuis plusieurs années chez Dennemeyer. En effet nous avons accompagné cette équipe depuis son adoption de Scrum en 2008 et dans son processus d’amélioration continue qui l’a conduit à adopter un mode de travail plus proche de Kanban aujourd’hui.

(la présentation a été publiée dans un billet précédent)

La préparation de cette session nous a permis de prendre du recul pour analyser et mieux comprendre le chemin parcouru avec cette équipe.

Les participants à notre session, leurs réactions et questions, et ainsi que d’autres discussions au cours de la conférence nous ont montré à quel point cette trajectoire d’évolution était pertinente pour certaines équipes.

Entre théorie et pragmatisme

Bien qu’aucune des sessions n’ait été réellement marquante, on a bénéficié à la fois de rappels théoriques importants pour comprendre les principes Lean/Kanban et de retours d’expérience pragmatiques.
Je dois reconnaître que j’ai du mal à m’approprier les aspects scientifiques, statistiques en particulier, que certains speakers ont mis en avant. Je ne vois pas comment les transposer dans le contexte des projets et clients avec lesquels nous travaillons. Même s’il est bon de garder en tête quelques principes théoriques clés, les sessions pragmatiques et les retours d’expériences ont retenu d’avantage mon attention.
Finalement tout le monde s’accorde sur le fait qu’il ne faut pas être dogmatique mais adapter la démarche et les solutions à son contexte spécifique.

Lean / Agile Management ?

De retour au Luxembourg, je réalise que l’agilité n’était pas affichée comme un thème de la conférence mais qu’elle était présente depuis la keynote d’ouverture de David J. Anderson et tout au long de ces 2 jours. Peut-être la dynamique de la communauté Lean/Kanban est-elle le signe qu’il y a dans ce domaine des concepts, un vocabulaire, une approche qui permettent de retenir plus facilement l’intérêt des managers et des dirigeants d’entreprises pour qui l’agilité, et Scrum en particulier, sont restés trop ésotériques et ont généré plus de crainte que d’enthousiasme.

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Notre présentation à la conférence LKFR 2012

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Lors de la conférence Lean Kanban France 2012, à Paris les 18-19 octobre, Yann Gensollen et moi avons pu partager un retour d’expérience sur l’évolution d’une équipe de Scrum à Kanban. Voici la présentation utilisée :

NEW! Retrouvez un bilan rapide de la conférence dans ce nouveau billet du 2 novembre.

 

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