the dev ops drumbeat reinventing the iron triangle

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC

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The DevOps Drumbeat

Reinventing the Iron Triangle

Jason BloombergPresident

[email protected]

@theebizwizard

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC2

About Jason Bloomberg

• President of Intellyx

• Advise companies on their digital transformation initiatives & help vendors communicate their agility stories

• Run Bloomberg Agile Architecture Certification course around the world

• Write for Forbes & Wired on Digital Transformation

• Buy my latest book, The Agile Architecture Revolution


The Iron Triangle


Quality: The Fourth Corner

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What about Agility?

• Business agility is a metarequirement

• Requirement that requirement change must be supported

• Balance quality and agility

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Requirement: Make the Organization More Agile


Agile Architecture Quality Star


Best-Effort Quality

• Quality takes time, limiting agility

• Insufficient agility lowers quality• Need to rethink approach to

quality• Preventing adverse behavior less

important than automatic recovery from such behavior– Core Cloud architecture principle

Resilience More Important than Being Defect-Free

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Resilience

• The ability to respond quickly and efficiently to negative change in the business environment– Managing risk– Bouncing back from

adverse events– Disaster recovery

• Tactical business driver

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The opposite of brittleness


Fit-for-Purpose Often Means Brittle

• Agile software built intentionally with only today’s needs in mind

• Planning for unexpected contingencies contrary to Agile approach

Brittle software leads to brittle organizations

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The Goal of Agile Software

• Requirement to build software that responds to changing requirements

• Inherent flexibility vs. rapid development & deployment

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DevOps & AA Quality Star


The DevOps Cadence

• Coordination of multiple iterations/sprints across multiple “projects”

• Agile approach to project/program management at enterprise level

• (Good) technical debt may cross iterations/sprints

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Bad vs. Good Technical Debt

• Bad technical debt– Sloppy code you

have to clean up later

– Rarely if ever a good thing

• Good technical debt– Intentional missing functionality or simplifications– Represented in backlog– Essential part of Agile/DevOps approach

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DevOps Drumbeat


The Design-Time Testing Conundrum

• The more dynamic and distributed the deployment environment, the less design-time QA can catch problems

• Testing increasingly in production– At system level

• Automated rollback/graceful degradation essential to DevOps model

Quality focus shifts to resilience

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Good Technical Debt vs. Resilience Tradeoff

• Resilience discussion focuses on risk mitigation– Cost of mitigation vs.

predicted cost of adverse event

• Do you take a shortcut on resilience or on functionality?


DevOps Cadence vs. Iron Triangle

• Iron Triangle context: discrete software projects

• DevOps context: continuous delivery & integration across multiple, ongoing sprints

• Scope shifts forward or backward as necessary– Reflected as incurring or

paying technical debt

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The Overbuilding Paradox

• How do stakeholders know what flexibility they will require?

• How generalized should code be?

• When to build capabilities vs. when to build affordances?

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Trade off building & changing software quickly for inherent flexibility


Capabilities vs. Affordances

• Capability– Ability to perform or

achieve certain outcomes through features or functions

– Apps have capabilities• Affordance

– A property of an object which allows an individual to perform an action

– Tools have affordances– Depends upon how user wants to use tool

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What are You Writing?

• Code?– Least flexible, most susceptible to overbuilding,

reuse always a challenge• Metadata via declarative programming?

– Abstracts code, but leads to complexity shell game• Abstract models?

– Essential for implementable Agile Architecture, but vendors largely fall short

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The Agility Platform

Your Application

Your Application

Application-Building

Tool

Your Application

Application-Building

Tool

Tool-Building Platform

Maximize Affordances


Coding for a Declarative Model

• Avoid declarative shell game– Pushing all the

complexity to the configuration (declarative model)

• Configuration should be– Standards-based– Browser UI friendly– Simple– Consistent

• Code should focus on affordances

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Tool-Building Agility Platform: Maximum Affordance

• Instead of software that can do things, want software that can enable users to do things – Maximize affordances – Software smart enough to

afford any action • Computers are examples

of maximum affordance• Build software with the

same purpose

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Working with Abstract Models

• Abstracts choice of schema

• Abstracts choice of API contract

• Abstracts semantic context

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Resolve to logical models at run time


Supporting Abstract Models in Software

• Tool-building platform (business agility platform)– All affordances, affords tool-

building capabilities• Application-building tool

– Affords application-building capabilities to non-developers

– Rich UI support– Non-imperative logic

• Event-driven, process-centric, and/or rules-based, for example

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The DevOps Big Picture

the dev ops drumbeat reinventing the iron triangle

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