Kanban - a sane way towards DevOps

Abstract:

DevOps is a higher form of agility. It is a blueprint for a great culture and and process between the different groups involved in the delivery pipeline. The big question is how to achieve it. If you are founding a startup today, it can be quite easy to take that blueprint and use it to create your process, hire the right versatile flexible people, and start delivering without any technical/automation debt or friction. But most of us are not founding new startups. Most of us already have a running operation with people, culture, process that matured over the years and despite its flaws is currently the way we do things. Changing that is non-trivial. For things to change people need to understand WHY change, what we are changing, and we need an effective process for managing the change itself (HOW to change). So what ARE we changing to? DevOps is highly focused on looking at the whole value stream from idea to value and ensuring effective flow through this pipeline. Kanban is ONE way of HOW to change. It starts by visualizing all the work flowing in the pipeline, then managing the flow focusing on finishing things end to end rather than starting in order to stay busy. It continues to what we call the "Work in process Diet" - Straining the flow more and more in order to identify obstacles to tighter and tighter DevOps culture/operation and faster feedback cycles. You can expect to come out of this session with ideas how to take your current operation and DevOpsify it in a safe evolutionary way using the Kanban method.

Speaker:

Yuval Yeret , AgileSparks

Yuval spent about a third of his 20 years IT career in Ops, a third in Dev, and the last third as a Lean/Agile consultant, which makes a great segway into the DevOps world... He leads the Kanban/Flow practice for AgileSparks, an international lean agile consulting company based out of Israel, leading several strategic long-term lean/agile initiatives in large enterprises. Yuval believes in pragmatic, best-of-breed approaches & avoiding Dogma. He recently received the Brickell Key Award for Lean Kanban community excellence & driving Kanban adoption in Israel. He blogs at yuvalyeret.com & self-published the “Holy Land Kanban” article collection. When not doing THAT you can find him with his wife & 2 small kids in Herzlyia, playing national league volleyball or listening to audiobooks like there is no tomorrow.