Day Three of Agile + DevOps East was my chance to branch out a little bit and check out a couple of half-day topics. My first stop would be Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and Legos, taught by Dana Pylayeva.
Prior to this class, everything I knew about DevOps, other than it being a buzzword I’ve seen more and more, could be summarized by this cartoon:
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| In short, my understanding of DevOps was that it ended up putting some new names to the same old behaviors. |
But Dana’s class changed all that. The brilliance of the class is that it’s totally hands on. The class was split into three groups: Devs, Ops, and Business. Then each table selected roles from a deck of cards. As developers, our tasks were to deliver packages containing a Lego animal and a piece of chocolate which would be built into packages by the Ops team and delivered to the Business so that we could get paid.
Simple, right? Everyone has a nicely defined role, we just do our thing and get paid. Why did I take this class again?
Then we didn’t deliver anything on the first Sprint. It didn’t feel like we were set up to fail either, we just followed our roles like good students and the failure just sort of happened. Requirements from the business were unclear, our big packages broke and got rejected, and the single Ops table got too backed up trying to deal with three Dev tables.
For the second Sprint, we tried some crosstraining. People got out of their rigid comfort zones, and things got a bit better. Everyone was more involved, and we were able to deliver a few things. But it wasn’t great.
For the third Sprint we got to simulate a Continuous Delivery model. Productivity went through the roof! We were slamming Lego creations and chocolate pieces into bags so quickly that we overwhelmed the business team, ran ourselves out of chocolates, and ran out of bags!
We were also all standing up, actively engaged, and talking to each other! Dev, QA, and Ops were huddled around tables, chairs pushed away, trying to get as much done as we possibly could.
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| This was our Sprint Two ending table. Total chaos, but happy learning. |
When the exercise ended, I got it. Explain to me enough times how DevOps is supposed to work, and I’m sure I’d get it eventually. But by having everyone in the class actively participate in the exercise, an entire class got the major concepts in just a couple of hours.
My afternoon class was Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions with Jeffery Payne. This was another good class, if not nearly as exciting as playing with Legos and chocolate.
Jeff walked us through a couple of real world cases of major project failures featuring “Agile” development, and had the class discuss the causes and how to avoid or fix them.
Most interesting to me was that some of the issues that he covered were also covered in the Agile Automation course I had attended. The class was a great summary of many of the pitfalls that companies can run into when trying to implement an Agile transformation.
The day capped off with a networking event. Every night of the conference has featured some kind of networking event, and the opportunity to connect more with fellow classmates and meet new people has been one of the major highlights for me. I’m not an extrovert by nature, but making myself meet new people has definitely been rewarding.