What does it takes to deliver software at speed, help organizational agility like other Unicorns? Answer: Organizational culture & CI/CD pipelines.
Context
Ten years since Jez Humble and Dave Farley book “Continuous Delivery“, 10+ years since the term “DevOps” coined, some are just starting, few struggling – the one main reason “Culture”. In this part-1 post, I want to share some of my observations & what CI/CD pipeline reflects.
What Does It Reflect?
It reflects the organizational culture.
- Organizational Cultures (Generative or not)
- How do we value our Customers? (Value Stream)
- How do we care about our engineers? (Reducing their cognitive load)
With the Formula-1 analogy, a racer on the track needs superior speed, excellent control and precision skills, a highly competent team, situational awareness. Like that, DevOps does not mean just CI/CD, automation & speed but also plugging in the necessary controls, tests/validations & compliance with the organizational compliance, security requirements, connecting & enhancing the end-end “flow”.
Discipline & Capability
CI/CD are disciplines & capabilities that Technology / Engineering teams require to build, test & release software changes – “continuously”. Continuously here does not mean that we are constantly shipping the code; we may, but rather it states that we have working/stable code readily available to push to production and release it to the customers as & when needed.
DevOps & CI/CD are interchangeably used by many folks, in my opinion, learning, practicing, and understanding DevOps – it is not. CI/CD is one of the few components that you need in your DevOps toolbox.
Though many organizations adopting DevOps, Cloud & Digital Transformation have CI/CD pipelines, my take on this is that CI/CD pipeline reflects organizational culture. It shows how the organization setup:
- To go fast/flow or slow
- As controller(with lots of gates, manual steps) or enabler
- Setup for agility or fragility
- What we care more or less or do not care at all
In my future posts of this series, I will dive into the picture (above) bit more in detail and share further thoughts on these “reflections” points:
Closing Thought:
I conclude this post with this quote from Dr Mik Kersten. Please share, spread – if this resonates with you. Thank you
“The only way to align your software architecture and your team structure is your org chart to the business around the customer and how business value flows to your customer.”
– Dr Mik Kersten.
BMK 