XP 2018

"We have reached an impasse and cannot accelerate our DevOps performance?" Does this sound like a common issue?
Often companies have DevOps practices in place, but are unable to accelerate their throughput of delivery speed. The ability to accelerate the time to deploy code releases is one of the key benefits of DevOps.

Lean thinking and management practices can further accelerate DevOps delivery by providing a set of measurement standards to help create more beneficial products, save money, boost productivity, reduce waste, and map to value.

Lean practices accelerate performance of project delivery in a DevOps environment by using a single, optimal set of practices and metrics that matter to reduce waste and accelerate productivity. Creating a system that bases their operations on lean principles that includes the following (a) value, (b) value streams, (c) flow, (d) pull, and (e) perfection. Consider lean calculations such as Takt time, Cycle Time, Queue Time, MTTR, and process lead time to help accelerate DevOps practices.

Other lean measures and metrics such as mean time to recovery (MTTR) can resolve the amount of time that to recover from failure, while Total Containment effectiveness (TCE), defect stratification by type, Poisson modeling for defect clustering, total defects per unit (TDU), rolled throughput yield (RTY) can be used to get to the root cause of defects and reduce them. While these are complex metrics used in Lean and Lean Six Sigma environments, many of their principles can be used to turbocharge operations.

In this session, the tenets of lean thinking will be linked to ways to improve and accelerate execution in DevOps environment. Flashcards will be provided to participants to train them on the tenets of lean metrics.

As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, I am passionate to find ways to accelerate throughput and performance, and remove bottlenecks and defects. This talk was presented at Agile2015, and well received by the group as a workshop where they uncovered better ways to improve software delivery processes. The talk is specifically formulated to improve DevOps but lean metrics can be used to measure and improve performance across all facets of software delivery.