Article Series: Patterns of DevOps Culture

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Introduction

DevOps is a movement. DevOps is a mindset. DevOps is devs and ops working together. DevOps is a way of organizing. DevOps is continuous learning.

The intangibility of DevOps makes it hard for leaders to come up with a clearcut roadmap for adopting DevOps in their organization. The meaning of DevOps is highly contextual, there are no popular methodologies with prescribed practices to abide by.

However, healthy organizations exhibit similar patterns of behavior, organization and improvement efforts. In this series we explore some of those patterns through testimonies from their practitioners and through analysis by consultants in the field who have been exposed to multiple DevOps adoption initiatives.

Contents

Practical Postmortems at Etsy

Daniel Schauenberg takes a look at Etsy's blameless postmortems, both in terms of philosophy, process and practical measures/guidance to avoid blame and better prepare for the next outage. Because failures are inevitable in complex socio-technical systems, it’s the failure handling and resolution that can be improved by learning from postmortems.

How Different Team Topologies Influence DevOps Culture

There are many different team topologies that can be effective for DevOps. Each topology comes with a slightly different culture, and a team topology suitable for one organisation may not be suited to another organisation, even in a similar sector. Matthew Skelton explores the cultural differences between team topologies for DevOps, to help you choose a suitable DevOps topology for your organisation.

Leadership, Mentoring and Team Chemistry

How does fire fighting compare to DevOps? Michael Biven, team lead at Ticketmaster, shares important lessons on leadership, mentoring and team chemistry from his experience as a fire fighter.

Infrastructure Code Reviews

As infrastructure becomes code, reviewing (and testing) provides the confidence necessary for refactoring and fixing systems. According to Chris Burroughs, reviews also help spread consistent best practices throughout an organization and are applicable where testing might require too much scaffolding.

Build Quality In - Book Review and Interview

Book review and interview with Steve Smith and Matthew Skelton, authors of "Build Quality In", a collection of experience reports (including their own) on Continuous Delivery and DevOps initiatives, by authors ranging from in-house technical and process leaders to external consultants implementing technical and organizational improvements.

Series Manager

Dev+Build+QA = DevOps advocate and InfoQ lead editor. Also thestartupdad.com. Jack of all trades, master of continuous improvement (bridging gaps since 2k).

Manuel believes validating ideas is key to real progress. Validating software (despite his fondness for TDD and BDD) is just one step.

Specialist in Continuous Delivery by day. Specialist in Changing Diapers by night.

Manuel tweets @manupaisable.

Related Topics:

• Architecture & Design
• Culture & Methods
• DevOps
• Service Design
• Web Services
• Monitoring
• Organizational Patterns
• SOA
• IT Service Management
• Patterns
• application performance management
• Culture
• Architecture
• Patterns of DevOps Culture
• Post-Mortems
• Performance
• Article Series
• Infrastructure
• Cloud Computing
• Enterprise Architecture

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