Continuous Improvement - DevOps Principle #5

One of the most common principles in the modern world of IT delivery.

We've managed to find a little twist in how we perceive continuous improvement. We say

"If it hurts do it more often."

In a DevOps culture, a strong focus is put on continuous improvement to enhance the products/services offered to customers. Some of the improvement activities include minimizing waste and optimizing speed, costs, and ease of delivery.

In Agile, we use retrospectives to facilitate continuous improvement. But in DevOps, waiting to dissect a time period longer than 1 day could result in massive waste and delays to delivering value to customers. Implementing measures to continuously improve on a daily if not event driven basis is the aspirational goal of DevOps.

We look at a strong emphasis on unit testing to ensure we fail fast, improve and move forward. We also look at proactive monitoring of features being introduced into production for both successful uptake and mitigation of known issues. Another method of baking in continuous improvement is having the space to experiment not only on ways to fixing problems but also to innovate.

Most importantly "What cannot be measured, cannot me improved."

Start with how you will measure improvements before detailing what it is you want to improve. This way, you will ensure improvements can be quantified for when someone important asks, "How are we going." Any actions you decide to take will be measured against your previous state and your target one. Developing measurement up front will be a challenging mindset shift for most. Much like TDD, upfront investment is required but has massive returns for how fast you can deliver to your customers.

Paul Mateos

Solutions Consultant | Pufferfish Solutions

paulmateos@pufferfish.solutions

To Learn more about the 6 Core principles of DevOps, please visit www.pufferfish.solutions/training or contact us today at info@pufferfish.solutions