Archive for February 11th, 2010
dev/ops with John Allspaw – The Agile Executive #08
Guest co-host Andrew Shafer and Coté talk with John Allspaw (now at etsy) about the dev/ops idea and, more interestingly, cultural and process needs and changes.
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Show Notes
- Check out the video of the Velocity talk we reference frequently. It has some actual meat when it comes to biting off a dev/ops culture, practices, and process.
- John opens up by speaking to tools vs/& culture
- I ask John how his org got over the hump of “we’re a special snow-flake” – resistance to change .
- Effecting cultural change by speaking to problems solved and benefits of the new culture.
- What are some major changes in ops and dev process/culture? Continuous deployment (pushing small changes, often).
- Getting beyond the culture of no – change management tends to be really “no management.”
- You have to have a good track record to do this (MTTR, MTTD) – don’t crash the car. What’s deployment to incident ratio?
- The role of metrics (monitoring) becomes important.
- Physical vs. virtual stuff in operations, EC2 use, etc. People use public cloud stuff for best-of-breed solutions, like SmugMug usage.
- Taking flickr from 25th most popular web property to the 5th.
- Coté is glad John’s at Etsy, cause it fuels the best blog du jour, regretsy.
A Core Formula for Agile B2C Statrups
Colleague Chris Sterling drew my attention to a Pivotal Labs talk by Nathaniel Talbott on Experiment-Driven Development (EDD). It is a forward-looking think piece, focused on development helping the business make decisions based on actual A/B Testing data. Basically, EDD to the business is like TDD to development.
Between this talk and a recent discussion with Columbia’s Yechiam Yemini on his Principle of Innovation and Entrepreneurship course, a core “formula” for Agile B2C startups emerges:
- Identify a business process P
- Create a minimum viable Internet service S to support P
- Apply EDD to S on just about any feature decision of significance
This core formula can be easily refined and extended. For example:
- Criteria for choosing P could/should be established
- Other kinds of testing (in addition to or instead of A/B testing) could be done
- A customer development layer could be added to the formula
- Many others…
By following this formula a startup can implement the Agile Triangle depicted below in a meaningful manner. Value is validated – it is determined based on real customer feedback rather than through conjectures, speculations or ego trips.
Figure 1 – The Agile Triangle (based on Figure 1-3 in Jim Highsmith‘s Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products)
The quip “The voice of the people is the voice of God” has long been a tenet of musicians. The “formula” described above enables the Agile B2C startup to capture the voice of the people and thoughtfully act on it to accomplish business results.
