DOES17

Creating a DevOps team that is itself a silo

Creating a third team called “DevOps” that is the approval committee for anything “DevOps” to be approved and rolled out in the organization through the Project Management Office.

@FletcherJofanon Exactly. I see this all.the.time.

My most favorite anti-patter is having a team that says "we are the devops team and we set up everything for you and we have a blacklog to manage your request"

DevOps without regular releases and feedback from real users contributing to the product backlog - fake DevOps

Just attaching DevOps as a label to everything because DevOps is a really cool word.

Silos - including creating separate DevOps team, breaking down the silos and providing visibly across the systems

Commenting out failing tests!

centralized command control which create wait states in the value stream. This can be a change board or a centralized Performance testing team or Security testing team

I read countless CV's from people that once wrote a batch file and that are now "DevOps engineers"

Top down driven DevOps with practices defined at the enterprise level.

Using the word DevOps to describe your old school, siloed way of working because you implemented one DevOps tool

Another anti-pattern - overhearing in post-mortem - "who did it?"

Pushing from the top without having bottoms up support and effort

@FletcherJofanon Creating a silo DevOps Team is absolutely THE anti-pattern

OH @carmendeardo : "like people going to quality conference & coming back and creating a Quality Team"

@schwartz_cio lol! yes!

OH - The Load Balancing team can't load balance themselves @topopal @realgenekim

DevOps anti-pattern is DevOps = tool. You need tools but you need collaboration, systems thinking feedback more

"Center of excellence" has a sense of eliteness to it.

@topopal - and lots of COEs often don't demonstrate excellence

Sometimes not obvious at all: amazing PPT by @andyburgin on Sky Betting Data Warehouse https://www.youtube....

Big Bang thinking is still a big anti-pattern. DevOps requires smaller batches. Hard to claim "DevOps" with a 6 mo deployment cycle

OH @scottprugh "Once people/teams go above 50%, queue times go exponential"

@topopal Anti-pattern: Architecture and engineering excellence can only come from CoE experts & towers

There is a ton of SrummerFall out there with the kabuki of Lean/Agile terminology over a big-batch waterfall process.

OH: "[without slack time], we feel like we're just stuck in a feature factory [that doesn't actually create value]"

Another very common antipattern is not investing in engineering system improvement.

On antipatterns, I'd also tag V-model thinking, that forces slow testing over fast feedback.

Assumptions about user behavior, rather than user-centric design and testing in production

@schwartz_cio +! on testing in production, with quantitative and qualitative validation.

whack-a-mole. Fix one thing and another pops up.

Clue. Who did what, with what tool, where? And now, make sure everybody becomes aware.

@alexaalley I think you nailed it!

The Campaign for North Africa. The game requires attention to logistics, methodology and an ability to understand the other players approach only through their moves on the 7 foot playing surface.

@paulycomtois - reminds me of the "Beer Game"... I wonder if we should build #DevOps game cc @realgenekim

@paulycomtois - http://www.supplycha... also good for teaching #Lean

@scottnasello @realgenekim I'm in on a DevOps board game, if we make it fun. :) @alexaalley and I created an Agile board game, and it's a blast!

@paulycomtois willing to share it and make it even better with help from others!

I think DevOps needs to be a cooperative game. Like Forbidden Island https://boardgamegee...

@paula_thrasher The point of the game is for everyone to work together, to get the artifacts off the island (into production!)

There is a great Kanban board game that I'd recommend to any DevOps team getkanban.com

@scottnasello MIT Beer Game. Awesome! https://en.wikipedia...

Othello - just when you think you're ahead, all of a sudden all your pieces get flipped over :-)

@scottnasello I think the Beer game might need to be a session at #DOES17 #educational

@RealGeneKim

"Phoenix Project" is to "The Goal"
"DevOps Game" is to "Beer Game"

Go - when you see a master at work, it's sublime

Don't restrict yourself to a single skill/language. Ops folks are usually well versed in several skills in the classic "T Shape" out of necessity. Continue to push yourself to learn outside of your core competency.

Infrastructure skills like: OS config, networking, load balancing

Understand how systems really run - what does it take to scale the system

How to better log error messages so that trouble shooting is easy.

better understanding the "day 2" operations and how the system design can be improved to improve MTTR

Monitoring tools don't help if your application code is not "monitorable"

basic network skills seems to be a reoccurring theme

Ensuring the non-functionals are covered - if you can't monitor/operate/scale/etc then the task isn't "done"!

@tomonocle IMO, we need to stop using the term "non-functional required" and everything is "functional requirements" - with NFR, things get ignored

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution. Technical debt is forever.

@markimbriaco Technical debt can be paid down, but its massively hard. Better to avoid it as much as possible.

@paula_thrasher Absolutely. At the very least, know when you're incurring tech debt and the impact.

"There's no place like Production"

Re skills, experimentation, or Build-MAsure-Learn, or Hypothesis-Driven Development. Pick your term.