David Scott Tufts

Safety: The ability for individuals to act without fear of unintended consequences

Contentment: Being satisfied with what you have

Freedom: The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hinderance or restraint

Empowered Teams

• Empowering ourselves and others to act, speak, and think as they need to with less hinderance.
• Permission to act
• Paired with the context to make good decisions
• With leaders who care about your purpose
• And share your beliefs
• Do the right hard thing

Build consensus on important decisions

• User your bonds to circulate plans with stakeholders
• Incorporate their criticism and feedback into the plan
• Present to the group
• Ask for consensus

Sting value propositions

• Pain killers, not vitamins
• Make something people love
• Needs not wants (one customer wants a feature; many customers need a feature)

Build a roadmap

• Start with your vision
• Align with customer feedback
• Balance innovation with customer needs
• Group them into themes, with an outcome for each
• Distill those into features, and validate with customers
  • Your themes should hold
  • Your outcomes might hold
  • The features will not hold

Managing Risk

• Small batches, near term hypothesis
• Validation comes from customers
• Introduce near-term volatility to gain decreased long-term risk

SOLVE THEORY ARGUMENTS WITH EXECUTION
Validate theory arguments with work, try it and look at the outcomes

Demo 

• Weekly
• Anyone with anything to show
• Invite everyone
• Record it and post it internally

Choose languages and tools that felt the job

• We are all polyglots
• Learning new languages and tools is one of the great joys of our industry
• Small batch + iterative development protects you from rest

Continuous Integrations

• Always integrate branches to master
• They should be short lived, iterative branches
• Fix the build when it goes red

The Four Eyed Rule

• Never deploy anything unless someone else sees it first

Write Tests

• Unit test (a single function)
• Integration tests (multiple classes/units)
• Functional tests (user-oriented, high-level, full-stack)
• Smoke tests (quickly determine if the system is “working”)

Continuous Delivery

• You can ship to your customer whatever product you want, whenever you feel like it, without drama.

One path per change

• The way change moves through your organization is fixed

Code goes through the same path

• Applications are code
• Infrastructure is code

Focus on availability

• Availability = uptime/uptime+downtime
• Focus your efforts on reducing mean time to diagnose and mean time to repair
• Failure is inevitable, it is how you respond and react to it that matters most

Collect Metrics

Plan for Capacity

• Identify key metics
• Put them on a graph
• Set a limit
• Plot a trend line
• Expand your time horizon

Only Alert on What is Actionable

• Get the attention of the right humans
• As few alerts as possible
• Rerouted to the people who can take action
• Start with one alert “Is the system up?”

Practice Incident Response

• Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
• Orient is the step that matters most
• The First Responder is the default Incident Commander
  • Decides who to do next
  • Coordinates resources
  • Communicates status
  • Not about rank
  • There is only one Incident Commander

Incident Lead to Post Mortems

• Invade the space: we are to learn, not to blame
• Describe the incident
• Establish a timeline
• Identify contributing factors
• Describe customer impact
• Describe remediation tasks
• Describe improvement tasks for response process

Use Scalable Systems Design

• Autonomous actors, responsible for themselves
• Making progress toward their goal
• Making clear promises to other actors
• Having those actors evaluate the quality of those promises

Have Humility:

• About your code
• About your position
• About your knowledge

Design Code to Favor

• Simplicity
• Extensibility
• Re-use

Safety in Technique

• Remember your principles
• Practice your forms
• Use your discernment

How to start DevOps

Stage 1 – Problem Selection

• Small enough to have a meaningful iteration in 8 weeks
• Vertical – not Horizontal

Stage 2 – Purpose, Beliefs, and Teams

• Write down your purpose
• Write down your beliefs
• Empower the team to act
• Be available for the context that the team will need (because we didn’t know everything when we started)

Stage 3 – Product Development

• Write down your value proposition
• Build a roadmap (Themes, Outcomes, Features)
• Include delights
• Focus on simplicity, extensibility, and reuse
• Take short iterations of the problem

Stage 4 – Iterate on Features

• Iterate on features
• Manage risk through small batches, validate with customers
• Choose languages and tools that fit the job
• Ignore scale
• When arguing about theory, focus on execution
• Demo every single week
• Use source control
• Have a bug database
• One workflow for change
• Four eyes
• Continuous integration
• Continuous delivery
• One test at a time (Unit, Integration, Functional, Smoke)
• Use scalable systems design
• Operate
  • Focus on availability
  • Collect metrics
  • Plan for capacity
  • Alert on what is actionable
  • Run incident response
  • Hold post mortems

Stage 5 – Deliver

• Final Demo
• Hold Retrospective