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.
The Agile Executive 