Design user-centric products and continuously deliver your software to production while collecting and incorporating feedback the whole time? Easy peasy. Well, if you’re a software startup. What about everyone else in the real world? What gets in your way and sucks the life from your eager soul? You name it, siloed organizations, outsourcing arrangements, overworked teams, regulatory constraints, annual budgeting processes, and legacy apps all add friction. I created a new Pluralsight course that looks at these challenges, and offers techniques for finding success.
DevOps in Hard Places is my 21st Pluralsight course, and hopefully one of the most useful ones. It clocks in at about 90 minutes, and is based on my own experience, the experience of people at other large companies, and feedback from some smart folks.
You’ll find three modules in this course, looking at the people, process, and technology challenges you face making a DevOps model successful in complex organizations. For each focus area, I review the status quo, how that impacts your chance of success, and 2-3 techniques that you can leverage.
The first looks at the people-related issues, and various ways to overcome them. In my experience, few people WANT to be blockers, but change is hard, and you have to lead the way.
The second module looks at processes that make a continuous delivery mindset difficult. I don’t know of too many processes that are SUPPOSED to be awful—except expense reporting which is designed to make you retire early—but over time, many processes make it difficult to get things done quickly.
Finally, we go over the hard technology scenarios that keep you from realizing your potential. If you have these problems, congratulations, it means you’ve been in business for a while and have technology that your company depends on. Now is the time to address some of those things holding you back.
Let me know what you think, and I hope this course helps you get un-stuck or recharged in your effort to get better at software.
Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 