CI/CD Pipeline Reflects Organizational Culture – Part 1

What does it take to deliver software at speed? CI/CD pipeline reflects organizational culture—how the organization is setup for flow or friction.

What does it take 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's book "Continuous Delivery", 10+ years since the term "DevOps" was 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-to-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 is 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

Closing Thought

I conclude this post with this quote from Dr Mik Kersten:

"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