Archive for August 2010
Outline of the Technical Debt Seminar at the Cutter Summit
Pictured above are speakers of the forthcoming Cutter Summit. Between the seventeen of us we will cover a broad spectrum of IT topics such as Agile, Enterprise Architecture, Business Strategy, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Governance and Security. Inter-disciplinary seminars, panels and case studies will weave all those threads together to give participants a clear view of the unfolding transformation in IT and of the new way(s) companies are starting to utilize IT. Click here for a details.
As Jim Highsmith and I continue to develop our joint seminar on technical debt for the summit, I would like to give readers of this blog a sense of where we are and ask for feedback. Right now we are considering the following building blocks for the seminar:
- The Nature of Technical Debt
- Technical Debt Metrics
- Monetizing Technical Debt
- Constructing Roadmaps for Paying Back Technical Debt
- Risk Assessment and Mitigation
- A Simple Software Governance Framework
- Schedule in the Simple Governance Framework
- Enlightened Governance
- Baking in Quality One Build at a Time
- How Often Should the Project Team Regroup?
- Multi-Level Governance
- Extending Technical Debt Techniques to Devops
- Use of Technical Debt Techniques in Agile Portfolio Management
- The Start Afresh Option
- Technical Debt as an Integral Part of a Value Delivery Culture
In the course of going through a subset of these building blocks, we will cover the latest and greatest from the October issue of the Cutter IT Journal on technical debt, present two case studies, and conduct a few group exercises.
From Vivek Kundra to Devops and Compounding Interest: Cutter’s Forthcoming Special Issue on Technical Debt
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/152453473/
In a little over a month the Cutter Consortium will publish a special issue of the Cutter IT Journal (CITJ) on Technical Debt. As the guest editor for this issue I had the privilege to set the direction for it and now have early exposure to the latest and greatest in research and field work from the various authors. This short post is intended to share with you some of the more exciting findings you could expect in this issue of the CITJ.
The picture above of the debt clock is a common metaphor that runs through all articles. The various authors are unanimously of the opinion that one must measure his/her technical debt, embed the measurements in the software governance process and relentlessly push hard to reduce technical debt. One can easily extrapolate this common thread to conjecture an initiative by Vivek Kundra to assess technical debt and its ramification at the national level.
Naturally, the specific areas of interest with respect to technical debt vary from one author to another. From the broad spectrum of topics addressed in the journal, I would like to mention two that are quite representative:
- One of the authors focuses on the difference between the manifestation of technical debt in dev versus its manifestation in devops, reaching the conclusion that the change in context (from dev to devops) makes quite a difference. The author actually doubts that the classical differentiation between “building the right system” and “building the system right” holds in devops.
- Another author derives formulas for calculating Recurring Interest and Compounding Interest in technical debt. The author uses these formulas to demonstrate two scenario: Scenario A in which technical debt as % of total product revenue is 12% and Scenario B in which technical debt as % of total product revenue is 280%. The fascinating thing is that this dramatic difference (12% v. 280%) is induced through much smaller variances in the Recurring Interest and the Compounding Interest.
I will blog much more on the subject when the CITJ issue is published in October. In addition, Jim Highsmith and I will discuss the findings of the various authors as part of our joint seminar on the subject in the forthcoming Cutter Summit.
Stay tuned!
Changing Culture to Enable Devops
InfoQ has posted the video recording of the panel on Cultural Change in Devops from DevOps Day US 2010. Under the skillful moderation of Andrew Shafer, panelists John Allpsaw, Lee Thompson, Lloyd Taylor and I shed light on the fascinating cultural dynamics that devops teams go through. The four of us and Andrew are not necessarily in complete agreement on every point, but we all emphasize one key lesson:
Defining learning and readiness in technical terms is inadequate in the devops context.
Click here for the recording of the panel on Changing Culture to Enable Devops.
A Good Start Point for Devops – Guest Post by Peter McGarahan
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevepj2009/3461077400/
Many of the devops posts in this blog were written from a dev perspective. Today’s guest post by Peter McGarahan examines the topic from the ops perspective. It is inspired by the following eloquent quip about change:
Assume we’re starting from scratch. Assume that we actually are a startup that doesn’t have over a hundred years of experience and sub-optimized IT legacy.
A few biographical details for readers who might not know Peter or know of him. Peter J. McGarahan is the founder and president of McGarahan & Associates, an IT Service Management consulting and training organization. Peter offers 27 years of IT and Business Service Management experience in optimizing and aligning the service and support organizations of the Fortune 1000 to deliver value against business objectives. His thought leadership has influenced the maturity and image of the service and support industry. His passion for customer service led the Taco Bell support organization to achieve the Help Desk Institute Team Excellence Award in 1995. IT Support News named him one of the “Top 25 Professionals in the Service and Support Industry” in 1999. Support professionals voted McGarahan “The Legend of the Year” in 2002 and again in 2004 at the Service Desk Professionals conference for his endless energy, mentoring and leadership coaching. As a practitioner, product manager and support industry analyst and expert, McGarahan has left his service signature on the support industry / community.
Here is Peter:
As a former Director of Infrastructure & Operations (I&O), I found it beneficial to establish a respectful working relationship with my Development Colleagues. It was important for the accountable leaders to better understand the objectives, workings and success metrics of each team. It was also critical for the leader to establish the ‘rules of engagement’ for how each team would assist each other in achieving their stated objectives (success metrics). It certainly helped to have an IT / Business leader who established a cooperative / collaborative teamwork culture. She also supported it with shared IT / Business objectives and performance goals for all accountable IT leaders. The I&O team certainly benefited from a CIO who understood the importance of customer service, the value of support and the business impact (negative IT perception) caused by repetitive incidents, problems and service disruptions. It was a game changing day for I&O when the CIO announced that all accountable leaders would have half of their performance objectives (bonus compensation) based on the success metrics of the I&O team.
In working with Infrastructure & Operations organizations, it has become apparent that as we continue to implement, measure and continuously improve the IT Infrastructure Library v3 (ITIL) processes, we must simultaneously address how we focus on all things new! In a recent Cutter Executive Update entitled IT’s Change Imperative, I relate lessons learned from my conversations with Geir Ramleth, CIO of Bechtel and Ron Griffin, Senior VP of Applications for Hewlett-Packard. Their leadership, vision and courage inspired me to think differently about how IT can better work together for the benefit of the business. In the end, the only success that matters – is the continued growth and profitability of the business. A summary of their change success stories:
- Hewlett-Packard CIO Randy Mott hired the right people to implement his IT strategy and change plan that included building, consolidating and automating its data centers; transferred work in-house from contractors; standardized on only a quarter of its apps; and built one central data warehouse — all while cutting spending in half.
- Geir Ramleth, CIO of Bechtel described how he used cloud computing principles to transform IT and make Bechtel’s computing environment more agile. He had a vision of allowing Bechtal’s global employees access to the right resources at any place at any time with any device – delivered securely and cost-effectively. He encouraged his IT people to step outside their comfort zones and do things in a different way. He resisted modifying the current state and went with the transformational change fearing they would only wind-up incrementally better. In targeting a desired end state, he gave his team guiding instructions to “Assume we’re starting from scratch. Assume that we actually are a startup that doesn’t have over a hundred years of experience and sub-optimized IT legacy.”
In the spirit of change, we should challenge ourselves to develop shared ‘devops’ goals / objectives. In the end, these should help us identify, link and realize how to translate IT objectives / metrics into tangible business benefits / value.
I have listed some shared ‘devops’ goals / objectives that I believe are a good starting point. I encourage and invite your thoughts, opinions and ideas around these and any others that you feel would aid ‘devops’ in working to establish measurable business value credibility.
- Lower the total cost of ownership of all services (best way to achieve this is build them with serviceability, usability and maintainability in the design of all new applications, systems and services).
- Increase business value – achieve business benefits (lower operational costs, increased revenues, improved customer experience)
- Simplified navigation
- Productivity enhancing capabilities /functionality
- Plug ‘n play integration
- Personalization
- Training / On-line Self-help features
3. Minimize business impact
- Reduce change-related outages / incidents.
- Reduce number of problems / incidents / calls.
- Reduce the number of requests / training-related calls / inquiries.
- Provide insights and tracking to the number of Known errors / workarounds / knowledge articles (solutions).
- Speed to resolution based on business prioritization model
- Operating Level Agreement / Commitment between Single Point of Contact (SPOC) Service Desk and internal IT Service Providers based on response / resolution times / commitments.
- Bug-fix Process:
– Provide insights into the ‘bug/fix/enhancement’ list and process with transparent visibility to business prioritization (needs / requirements / quantifiable benefits).
4. Improved and frequent Communication
- A marketing / product launch / status update and awareness campaign.
- Especially around rollout / enhancement time.
Forthcoming Technical Debt Events
In just about a week I will be sharing the latest and greatest in technical debt techniques through a Cutter webinar in which colleague John Heintz and I will be speaking . In a little over a month a special issue of the Cutter IT Journal [CITJ] on technical debt will be published. And, in a couple of months Jim Highsmith and I will deliver a workshop on the subject in the Cutter Summit.
Shifting from the process to its output (i.e. the code) is the common thread that runs through the three events. Rigorous that your implementation of the software process is, the proof of the pudding is the quality of the code your teams produce. The technical debt accrued in the code is the ultimate acid test for your success with the Agile roll-out and/or with any other software method you might be using.
Another important thread in all three events is a single source of truth. The technical debt data seen by the developer in the trenches, his/her project leader, the mid-level manager on the project, the vice president of engineering and the CFO/CEO represents different views of the realities of the code. Each level sees a different aggregation of data – all the way from a blocking violation at a specific line of code to the aggregate $$ amount required to “pay back” the debt. But, there is no distortion between the five levels of the technical debt data – all draw upon the code itself as the single source of truth.
Here is the announcement of the first event – the Reining in Technical Debt webinar scheduled for August 19, 12:00PM EDT:
Do you really govern the software development process in your IT organization or do its uncertainty and unpredictability leave you aghast? Do you manage to bake in quality in every build? Can you assess the quality of your software in a way that quantifies the risk?
Recent developments in software engineering and in software governance enable you to tie quality, cost, and value together to form a simple and effective governance framework for software. This webinar will provide you with a preliminary understanding of how to assess quality through technical debt techniques, will familiarize you with state-of-the-art tools for measuring technical debt, and will demonstrate the effect on value delivery when technical debt is not “paid back” promptly.
Israel and John will also introduce a governance framework that ensures you can rigorously manage your software development process from a business perspective. This framework reduces a large number of complex technical considerations to a common denominator that is easily understood by both technical and non-technical people — dollars.
Get Your Questions Answered
Don’t miss your chance to get specific advice from Cutter’s experts on technical debt and toxic code. Join us on Thursday, August 19 at 12:00 EDT (see your local time here) to learn how both your software development process(es) and the corresponding governance process can be transformed in a manner that will make a big difference to your software developers and testers, to key stakeholders in your company, and to your firm’s customers.
Register Now!
Register to attend so you’ll have the opportunity to have your specific questions answered. We’ll send you the login instructions a day prior to the webinar.
As always, this Cutter Webinar is not vendor sponsored, and is available to Cutter clients and our guests at no charge. Register here.
Pass this invitation along!
Be sure to extend our invitation to your CIO, CFO and the other senior business-IT leaders and trainers in your organization who you think could benefit from this discussion.
If you have any questions prior to the program, please contact Kim Leonard at kleonard@cutter.com or call her directly at +1 781 648 8700.
Can’t Make the Live Event?
You won’t miss out — the recording will be added to the webinarsonline resource center for client access, along with the rest of these past events.
Beyond Devops
Based on feedback from participants in my Agile 2010 workshop “How We Do Things Around Here In Order To Succeed,” I am planning to offer the workshop as a one-day seminar. A tentative agenda for the seminar is as follows:
- Introduction to Cultural Framework
- Exercise #1: Determine Your Culture
- Exercise #2: Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Culture
- Change Behavior, Not Culture
- When Cultures Meet
- Exercise #3: Conflicts in Devops
- The Agile Flywheel
- Exercise #4: Using Technical Debt as a Boundary Object
- Bringing Individuals and Organizations Together
- Exercise #5: It is About Sharing the Process, Not Just Sharing the Information
- Exercise #6: From success in devops to end-to-end success
Until I publish a full-fledged outline for the seminar, here is the central theme:
Beyond Devops
Inter-departmental flow in a corporate setting is often envisioned as the inner workings of a swiss watch. Wheels turn other wheels in a precise manner. Not only is effectiveness maintained, it is maintained in an efficient manner.
Problem is, many individuals and most departments hold distorted views of the departments they interact with. Reasonable distortions can be mitigated as long as the operational balance between departments is maintained. Once the operational balance is broken the “swiss watch” stops to function as the inter-departmental distortions block any attempt to restore the balance.
The most effective way to get dev and ops on a path of collaboration is for the two departments to jointly construct a boundary object. As dev and ops are joined in the hip through the code, and even more so through its quality, technical debt is well suited to serve as the core of a boundary object around which the two department share meaning while retaining operational autonomy.
Similar boundary objects can be constructed between dev and other departments – customer support, professional services, marketing, sales and finance. When conceived and implemented in a manner that links numerous boundary objects together, Agile success in dev can be extended to both upstream and downstream functions.
This is Not a “Me Too” Product
I had the distinct pleasure to discuss AgileEVM over dinner yesterday with its two “fathers” – Chris Sterling and Brent Barton. I was much impressed by the originality of the concept, the clear differentiation of the product and the laser focus on Earned Value Management (EVM) aspects.
Governance of the software development process is a topic that has been much discussed in various Cutter publications – see for example recent Cutter blog posts by Stephen Andriole, Robert Charette, Jim Highsmith, Vince Kellen, Masa Maeda, Michael Mah and me. Chris and Brent add a layer of EVM – both in terms of theoretical foundations and actual tool – to our spectrum of thoughts on governance. IMHO AgileEVM has the potential to induce a disruption in the way companies go about the business of governing software.
AgileEVM is particularly intriguing as a {product + professional services} combo. Chris and Brent are well-known as awesome Agile consultants. The opportunity to pick their brains twice – once through the product, a second time through a related consulting engagement with them – is most attractive.
The two “pages” below give a sense of the power of the product. Even better, simply download the product through the AgileEVM website.
Grab Chris or Brent for a 1-1 demo if you are at Agile 2010 this week. You will not be disappointed…
A Devops Case Study
An outline of my forthcoming Agile 2010 workshop was given in the post “A Recipe for Handling Cultural Conflicts in Devops and Beyond” earlier this week. Here is the case study around which the workshop is structured:
NotHere, Inc. Case Study
NotHere, Inc. is a $500M company based in Jerusalem, Israel. The company developed an eCommerce platform for small to medium retailers. Through a combination of this platform and its hosting data center, NotHere provides online store fronts, shopping carts, order processing, inventory, billing and marketing services to tens of thousands of retailers in a broad spectrum of verticals. For these retailers, NotHere is a one-stop “shopping” for all their online needs. In particular, instead of partnering with multiple companies like Amazon, Ebay, PayPal and Shopzilla, a retailer merely needs to partner with NotHere (who partners with these four companies and many others).
The small to medium retailers that use the good services of NotHere are critically dependent on the availability of its data center. For all practical purposes retailers are (temporarily) dead when the NotHere data center is not available. In recognition of the criticality of this aspect of its IT operations, NotHere invested a lot of effort in maturing its ITIL[i] processes. Its IT department successfully implements the ITIL service support and service delivery functions depicted in the figure below. From an operational perspective, an overall availability level of four nines is consistently attained. The company advertises this availability level as a major market differentiator.
In response to the accelerating pace in its marketplace, NotHere has been quite aggressive and successful in transitioning to Agile in product management, dev and test. Code quality, productivity and time-to-producing-code have been much improved over the past couple of years. The company measures those three metrics (quality, productivity, time-to-producing-code) regularly. The metrics feed into whole-hearted continuous improvement programs in product management, dev and test. They also serve as major components in evaluating the performance of the CTO and of the EVP of marketing.
NotHere has recently been struggling to reconcile velocity in development with availability in IT operations. Numerous attempts to turn speedy code development into fast service delivery have not been successful on two accounts:
- Technical: Early attempts to turn Continuous Integration into Continuous Deployment created numerous “hiccups” in both availability and audit.
- Cultural: Dev is a competence culture; ops is a control culture.
A lot of tension has arisen between dev and ops as a result of the cultural differences compounding the technical differences. The situation deteriorated big time when the “lagging behind” picture below leaked from dev circles to ops.
The CEO of the company is of the opinion NotHere must reach the stage of Delivery over Development. She is not too interested in departmental metrics like the time it takes to develop code or the time it takes to deploy it. From her perspective, overall time-to-delivery (of service to the retailers) is the only meaningful business metric.
To accomplish Delivery over Development, the CEO launched a “Making Cats Work with Dogs[ii]” project. She gave the picture above to the CTO and CIO, making it crystal clear that the picture represents the end-point with respect to the relationship she expects the two of them and their departments to reach. Specifically, the CEO asked the CTO and the CIO to convene their staffs so that each department will:
- Document its Outmodel (in the sense explored in the “How We Do Things Around Here In Order to Succeed” workshop) of the other department.
- Compile a list of requirements it would like to put on the other group “to get its act together.”
The CEO also indicated she will convene and chair a meeting between the two departments. In this meeting she would like each department to present its two deliverables (world view of the other department & and the requirements to be put on it) and listen carefully to reflections and reactions from the other department. She expects the meeting will be the first step toward a mutual agreement between the two departments how to speed up overall service delivery.
[i] “Information Technology Infrastructure library – a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations” [Wikipedia].[ii] I am indebted to Patrick DeBois for suggesting this title.
© Copyright 2010 Israel Gat
As If Another Proof Point Was Needed
Annie Shum’s interview earlier this week gave readers of this blog a multi-dimensional view of imminent changes in IT. If you needed independent validation, it came yesterday through EMC’s Chuck Hollis words in the national solution provider GreenPages Technology Solutions’ 14th annual summit:
Vice President Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis Monday said the changes resulting from the storage giant’s own no-holds barred journey to the private cloud led to a decline in IT employee job satisfaction…
Hollis said the internal IT satisfaction drop came in the second phase of the EMC cloud revolution focused squarely on mission critical applications. That second phase — which EMC is in the midst of now — has sparked major changes in IT jobs as the company has replaced IT management, security staff and backend IT staff.
“During this phase, this is where org (organizational) chart issues started to come in,” Hollis said. “People’s jobs started to change. Younger people in the organization were being promoted over older people.”
As if another proof point to add to Annie‘s rigorous data was needed…
A Recipe for Handling Cultural Conflicts in Devops and Beyond
My Agile 2010 workshop “How We Do Things Around Here In Order To Succeed” will weave together four trends that I am witnessing in my practice:
- The ascendance of Agile portfolio management in a world characterized by loosely coupled processes
- Devops dynamics are becoming more and more characteristic of end-to-end Agile/Kanban patterns
- Viral spread of technical debt metrics in software governance
- Increasing use of boundary objects in the enterprise context
The workshop is structured around three case studies/exercises that will take about two-thirds of the allotted time (the morning of August 9). The other third provides the theory and tools to be used in the three workshop exercises and (hopefully) in many future engagements participants in the workshop will carry out. Deep technical knowledge is not required – the workshop targets any Agile practitioner who has conceptual grasp of culture, software development, IT operations and portfolio management.
The #1 takeaway from the presentation is the details you need to know about creation and capture of lasting value through end-to-end Agile initiatives.
Here is the workshop agenda (still subject to some minor tweaking):
- Introduction to Cultural Framework
- Exercise #1: Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Culture
- Change Behavior, Not Culture
- When Organizations Clash
- Exercise #2: Conflicts in Devops
- The Agile Flywheel
- Exercise #3: Using Technical Debt as a Boundary Object in Devops
- Bringing Organizations Together Through Enlightened Governance Loops
I look forward to meeting you in the workshop and learning from your experiences and insights!
Israel
The Agile Executive 