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  • Improve Efficiency With Smaller Code Reviews

    Improve Efficiency With Smaller Code Reviews

    In software development, code review plays a significant role in helping detect issues in your application’s source code early and promote collaboration among your team members. Breaking down code reviews into more manageable portions can yield great benefits. Review cycles are shorter and more convenient to comprehend when they are smaller. In other words, smaller reviews are easier to comprehend and provide feedback cycles. As a result, we can reduce development, deployment and debugging times while reducing the scope of change in each iteration.

    This article presents a discussion on code reviews, why they are important, their benefits and why smaller code review cycles are more effective than larger ones.

    What is Code Review?

    Code review is defined as a software development process which involves reviewing code written by other developers. As part of the development process, it aims to improve code quality, ensure compliance with standards and identify and fix problems early on. Code reviews play a role in software development as they help catch errors before they turn into significant issues.

    Peer reviews allow developers to detect errors or defects in each other’s code. By reviewing each other’s code, developers are able to identify bugs and flaws in the code. It helps deliver code that is secure and sustainable, adheres to standards and detects and resolves problems early in the development life cycle.

    This can either be a formal process, where code is systematically evaluated according to a checklist or set of guidelines, or an informal process, where code is reviewed ad hoc. Code review can be performed by the same developers working on the code or by other developers with expertise in the relevant domain or technology.

    ​By engaging in the exchange of feedback and actively participating in code reviews, we can ensure that the code is well-organized, easy to comprehend, adapt and extend over time. To be effective, it’s essential that everyone on the team is on the same page when it comes to their expectations and goals regarding these reviews.

    Here are the key benefits of code review at a glance:

    • Identify bugs and issues
    • Improve code quality, consistency and maintainability
    • Enforce coding standards
    • Foster team collaboration
    • Promote knowledge sharing

    Best Practices of Code Review

    Here are some of the best practices you should follow to improve your code review process:

    • Review small units of code
    • Set clear objectives and guidelines
    • Involve multiple reviewers
    • Provide constructive and respectful feedback
    • Use code review tools
    • Prioritize high-risk areas
    • Balance attention to detail with time efficiency
    • Encourage collaboration and learning
    • Set realistic deadlines
    • Follow up and close the loop

    Automating the Code Review Process

    Automated code reviews can help you enhance collaboration amongst your team and reduce the time spent in each cycle. Your developers can improve code quality and maximize productivity by automating the development workflow.

    Here are the key benefits of automating the code review process:

    • Enhances code quality
    • Improves productivity
    • Enhances code quality
    • Improves collaboration
    • Fosters learning opportunities

    The Problem With Large Code Reviews

    The traditional approach to code review often involves reviewing large chunks of code in a single session. Although this approach is initially efficient, it can lead to multiple problems. You will need more effort and spend more time reviewing large chunks of code. If code reviews are extensive and take longer to complete, it can often result in decreased attention to detail. Due to this, the likelihood of missing crucial errors and reviewer fatigue will increase, resulting in delays in feedback and completing the code review process.

    The Benefits of Smaller Code Reviews

    When the code review cycle is small, it becomes easier to track deployment changes easily. Smaller code reviews continuously improve development, deployment and debugging times and reduce the radius of a change set. As a result, it promotes faster deployment and helps identify issues easily and early in the software development life cycle.

    Once a code review cycle is complete, the code goes through many steps before it finally reaches the production phase. Monitoring the application’s performance and detecting bugs (if any) is much easier when you make only minimal changes to your code. When the changes are small, it is easier to track the application’s behavior and detect bugs.

    Here are some benefits of adopting smaller code reviews:

    Focused Review

    Reviewing smaller chunks of code enables you to analyze the code in a more focused and in-depth manner. This helps reviewers focus on specific functionality or components, leading to more accurate feedback.

    Reduced Cognitive Load

    Limiting the amount of code to review reduces cognitive overload for both developers and reviewers. Smaller code review cycles can be more efficient because they break down the review process into more manageable chunks. As a result, you’ll be able to evaluate code quality in a much more effective and efficient manner and identify potential issues or improvements more easily.

    Faster Feedback Loop

    Smaller code reviews can significantly speed up the feedback loop in the development process. Hence, feedback cycles will be faster, i.e., you will be able to receive feedback faster, resulting in quicker iterations and faster software delivery. The smaller the review, the easier it is to digest and the faster the feedback cycle.

    Enhanced Collaboration

    Smaller code reviews allow for more focused discussions and collaboration between reviewers and developers. Most importantly, since you can handle concerns effectively and efficiently, you can engage in more productive discussions. The efficiency and effectiveness of code reviews improves when the expectations of all stakeholders are aligned.

    Measuring Success

    To measure the success of smaller code reviews, consider the metrics and approaches given below:

    Defect Detection Rate

    This is a measure of the number of defects or issues identified during a code review cycle relative to the number of defects found later in testing or in the production environment. Note that a higher defect detection rate indicates you’re able to detect defects effectively.

    Review Efficiency

    Calculate the time it takes to review a chunk of code to understand the pace and efficiency of the code review process.

    Feedback Quality

    Assess the quality of the feedback provided during reviews, such as checking if the feedback is constructive, clear and actionable. Note that if the feedback is of high quality, it would typically yield better code improvements and learning opportunities for your team.

    Cycle Time

    The duration of the code review process is an indicator of efficiency. A shorter cycle time suggests an efficient review process, but quality should not be compromised.

    Automated Checks Integration

    Evaluate how effectively automated tools are integrated into the code review process to detect common issues and reduce the manual effort required in reviews.

    Knowledge Sharing

    Assess how well the code review process facilitates knowledge sharing and cross-team learning. This can be observed through the diversity of reviewers and the nature of the discussions in the review process.

    Bug Rates Post-Release

    Monitor the incidence of bugs or issues in the code post-release. A decrease in this rate can indicate that the code review process is effectively catching and addressing potential problems before release.

    Conclusion

    Code review helps produce code that is highly performant, scalable, secure and compliant with the recommended standards. Code reviews can make the codebase easily understood, flexible and scalable. A collaborative approach to code review can yield several benefits, such as promoting a culture of continuous development and learning, maintaining an organized codebase with clean code and clear structure, helping detect and resolve issues quickly, etc.

  • How to Supercharge Your Engineering Teams

    How to Supercharge Your Engineering Teams

    With the economy still bleak, data and engineering teams that were already struggling to keep pace with business needs are now facing a potential hiring freeze or worse in 2023. That’s why there’s never been a more important time to maximize the productivity and impact of your teams, but the question is how to identify the big changes that move the needle in performance. Incremental adjustments that save a sliver of time here and there are not hard to come by, but what teams need are the breakthroughs that yield giant leaps in productivity and efficiency. Rather than a 10% improvement, it’s the 10x improvements that drive lasting gains.

    As an engineer and CEO of a software company, I’m constantly looking for ways to boost the productivity of our teams. Our guiding principle is simple: Maximize the impact per hour invested for every individual. To do that, we must ensure that individuals maximize the time spent flexing their superpowers, minimize busy work and reduce dependencies on others that delay work or tie them up in meetings. While counterintuitive at first, we consistently find that collections of well-aligned, independently executing individuals produce a far greater impact than a large team swarming on a project. Put another way; the individual impact goes up when the number of people you depend on to deliver the result goes down.

    I’ve developed an approach over the years that has allowed me to identify several opportunities for step-change advancements in productivity and efficiency, and I’d like to share it here, along with two concrete examples. I will also share an exercise we run with our teams to help identify and execute these opportunities.

    First, here are my two main criteria for identifying the projects and tasks where we can effect changes that will have an outsized impact on the company:

    ● Big resource-consumers: Work that’s essential to the business but consumes a large amount of engineering and other resources is a top candidate for optimization.
    ● Big impact, easy win: Areas that will have a significant impact on company performance if we can do them faster and with higher frequency are also great candidates—even if they’re not consuming a ton of resources.

    Here are two examples that illustrate each of those criteria and where we were able to see massive gains in productivity, quality of service, or both.

    Tackling Big Resource-Consumers

    At Ascend.io, we provide a platform for building and automating data pipelines, which requires us to build connectors into a huge variety of data sources. At one time, building a new connector required multiple engineers to spend two to three weeks writing more than 5,000 lines of code that spanned four microservices in three different languages. As we added more customers and needed to support more data sources, this quickly became unsustainable.

    When we looked at this process, we saw two issues: Engineers were writing custom code for each connector in a way that would be better served by a common framework. Moreover, the process required engineers from multiple teams and disciplines to work together and coordinate their priorities. As soon as you get dependencies that require engineers to coordinate with others and wait on the outcomes of other people’s work, you’re wasting time.

    We addressed this by designing a new development framework that exploits commonalities across the connectors we build. This now requires far less unique code and removes the need for multiple engineers to work together. In most cases, one person can build a new connector in days with 100 lines of code. This made us far more nimble and freed up engineering time to do other valuable work.

    Achieving High Impact

    Like most companies building software, we need to convey the capabilities of our product to new and existing users to ensure they receive maximum benefit from their use of Ascend. With new features and enhancements being released on a weekly basis, there is a lot to keep up with. This is high-impact work, however, and if we can do it in a vastly better way, it drives an outsized impact for Ascend and our customers.

    For us, building these automated product tours typically required a product marketer or product manager to design the customer journey, and one or more engineers on a sustained basis to build the actions into the product. This again creates dependencies that slow progress and require significant manual coding.

    The breakthrough for us was a tool called Intercom, which allows you to build sophisticated product tours without needing to write code. Our product team can now build more interesting and complex product tours for customers, and our engineers can stay focused on building new features instead of the code needed to showcase them. What’s more, they are able to design, test and deploy these tours independent of our product and code deployment cycle, further freeing them to iterate as fast as possible.

    A Thought Experiment

    So how do you actually find these opportunities for 10x improvement? I run the following thought experiment with our teams several times a year to uncover these opportunities:

    Imagine your workload scales 10x overnight and you absolutely must meet this increased need, but without hiring more engineers or working more hours. How do you do it?

    It’s amazing what this exercise can uncover—but there are ground rules and it can take time to see results. Coming up with these big ideas is a skill like any other, and most people are not great at it the first time they try it. Your first iteration may produce no options to pursue—some may have high-impact ideas but with even higher investment requirements, while others may reject the premise outright. That’s normal. So, don’t insist they sit in a room until they dream up that 10x breakthrough, because it will be demoralizing. Instead, plant the seeds by establishing the above framework and then let the ideas start to grow.

    More likely, a few days later, they’ll be out for a hike or chatting with an old co-worker and they’ll suddenly have the germ of an idea. That may still not be the winning solution, but someone else will build on it, and then someone else and, finally, you iterate your way to a breakthrough. Pulling the team back together and embracing the “yes, and” approach can be both energizing and highly productive.

    Brainstorming like this is fast and free, and you only need one great idea to have a material impact. We run this exercise a few times a year and have come up with several big ideas that were game-changers for the company. Besides the examples above, we also moved key parts of our software development from Scala and Go to Python a few years ago, which is a much more efficient language (as measured by developer time) and allows our engineers to build things much faster.

    Software engineering is a complex beast that often spans many teams working on multiple processes in parallel. But that complexity is also your opportunity: Every complex system has room for optimization, especially at companies that moved fast in the beginning to build a product and find market fit. Now is the time to lift your gaze, look around and ask where significant gains can be made. They almost certainly exist, and a 10x improvement could be what allows you to not only survive the turbulent year ahead but emerge with a thriving team and business on the other side.

  • Building New Value in IT Systems Management

    Building New Value in IT Systems Management

    For decades, companies treated the IT system as a cost center not much different from facilities maintenance. The job of IT was to keep the lights on, ensuring that the technology a company used worked and that the costs of keeping it working were kept under control. Those days are well over. Not only is technology an operational necessity, but everyone now recognizes that the way companies strategically use technology—whether they buy it, rent it or build it—has a direct impact on company performance. This goes beyond efficiency. Technology is key for everything from customer acquisition and engagement to competitive differentiation and advantage.

    As it turns out, however, not every company has been able to rethink and reconfigure its IT system to meet these new demands. That’s not surprising. Not only does this require a mindset shift from the C-suite on down, but it also requires restructuring the IT function to ensure it supports business objectives in a consistent and measurable way.

    While transforming IT from a cost center to a profit center can hardly happen overnight, there are three things that any company can do to turn IT into both a business enabler and a business driver.

    1. Establish Full Transparency Over Your IT System

    A mission-critical IT system needs to have a thorough understanding of what the organization’s IT landscape looks like. Spending money on duplicate applications and unused licenses is a waste. Unknown SaaS applications pose a persistent security risk. Optimizing spend and improving security are table stakes for business-enabling IT.

    The fact that anyone in a company with a credit card can subscribe to a SaaS service is the main challenge. Effectively tracking down all SaaS applications and licenses, along with monitoring SaaS usage, can’t be handled manually. What is needed, as with other tedious tasks, is automation. For example, by integrating a SaaS management platform (SMP) with SSO and expense management solutions, organizations can automate the discovery of SaaS. When the SMP also integrates with the primary SaaS vendors companies rely on (Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, etc.), it allows organizations to keep track of usage.

    The goal here isn’t for a centralized IT function to exercise more control over the software used by organizations. Instead, the goal is leveraging automation strategically to produce the kind of data-driven insights that allow organizations to make better, more informed decisions about the technology it uses.

    2. Promote Engineering Efficiency

    All companies today are software companies. This means that the engineering function needs to be thought of us as part of the overall IT estate. Not only does the IT system need to support engineering as it would any other business function, but the technology created by engineering itself inevitably becomes part of the broader technology landscape managed by IT.

    Mission-critical IT supports engineering efficiency in at least two ways. First, IT should provide the tools and capabilities needed to drive engineering efficiency. For a long time, measuring the efficiency of engineering was either not done at all or was based on meaningless vanity metrics such as lines of code. Recently, DORA metrics have emerged as the scientifically validated method, widely trusted by engineering teams themselves, for tracking efficiency. IT needs to enable easy tracking of these metrics.

    IT should also facilitate the creation and maintenance of a service catalog for engineering teams. Maintenance of this catalog not only promotes the reuse of services, itself a hallmark of engineering efficiency but also makes it possible to quickly mitigate security issues associated with microservices (Log4j being just one example from the last 12 months).

    Beyond efficiency, however, IT can also support in-house software creation by helping engineering teams with value stream management so they can track the business impact of the software they create. While efficiency can have a business impact (realized through time/cost savings), software drives the business forward when it effectively meets customer needs. IT can facilitate these insights by connecting the dots between customer feature requests, product changes and increased adoption (of products and features).

    3. Make Enterprise Architecture Strategic

    An IT function serving as a mission-critical part of the organization cultivates a comprehensive overview of the software landscape and supports engineering efficiency, as suggested, by viewing the development environment as an integral part of the broader technology estate. However, IT system leaders need to do something more to effectively collaborate with the business leaders and drive the business forward.

    Specifically, IT leaders need to provide the business with insight into all the ways technology influences business performance. This means highlighting risks that need to be addressed, uncovering opportunities that should be pursued, and suggesting options for future planning. Thoughtful and strategic enterprise architecture management here is the key.

    A strategic approach to enterprise architecture management means focusing less on governance (who gets to use what) and more on reducing complexity to promote agility and quick decision-making. The first step in this direction is the adoption of a common language that aligns the business and IT. Business capabilities and the creation of business capabilities maps for different departments serve this purpose.

    To make decisions about technology, business leaders need to know what they are working with. Reliable and current data is essential. For this reason, your enterprise architecture management needs to prioritize ongoing data collection and the maintenance of data quality.

    Finally, to make objectives and options transparent, IT needs to be capable of strategically displaying all enterprise architecture data in a way that can be easily understood and acted on.

    Where Do You Start?

    Taming an unruly SaaS landscape, making it possible to build better software and guiding technology strategy are all easier said than done.

    The good news is, ongoing innovation has created solutions that are easier to use, effectively leverage automation and integrate with all relevant systems. In other words, the tools are there. All that’s needed is the commitment to transforming the IT system and developing it into the critical business function it can and should be.

  • Don’t Let Developer Toil Affect the Business Value of Your Apps

    Don’t Let Developer Toil Affect the Business Value of Your Apps

    It is no surprise that the world today is driven by apps. Organizations all over the world are basing their business goals on their capacity to integrate new apps quickly, and they need to constantly reimagine how they interact with and communicate with their consumers and employees to fulfill changing expectations. To do this effectively, businesses need to operate at a high level of speed and agility. But in many cases, this isn’t happening. The phrase ‘move fast and break things’ could not be further from the truth when it comes to how enterprises approach innovation today. In fact, according to Forrester Consulting, 48% of executives say they haven’t changed their applications in a year or more. One reason for this may be that organizations are dealing with a high amount of developer toil and technical debt. Developer toil is the repetitive, predictable, constant stream of tasks that support the creation of software and how it’s run, but don’t actually affect the features in the software that people use. Or in other words “any activities that don’t directly create business value.”

    Typically, developers spend too much time on processes that could be automated or even eliminated. Ironically, this toil builds up over time as their organizations prioritize shipping features rather than addressing these problems in their overall software process. While developers can change their software quickly at first, just like debt in real life, if this toil and tech debt are neglected, it takes over and consumes the organization’s ability to grow. This results in long, infrequent release cycles. A feature that seemed simple and once took just 15 minutes now takes weeks, even months, to get in front of users.

    Conducting a Developer Toil Audit

    Anything you can do to speed up your software release cycle will improve the quality, resilience and business value of your software. Continuously addressing developer toil provides a significant boost to your organization’s software capabilities. For one of VMware’s customers, addressing developer toil reduced the time taken to introduce a new feature significantly–from 400 hours to just 24 by doing a developer toil audit and addressing key factors contributing to this technical debt.

    So how can organizations overcome developer toil? One way to do this is through a developer toil audit. This is a systematic process for finding, valuing and prioritizing fixing waste in your software process. First, the process finds wasted time and process debt in how you build and release software. Second, the process then helps you justify delaying working on features in favor of eliminating and automating your software creation process. The result is speeding up your software release cycle. The more frequently you can change and release software, even with just small changes, the more opportunities you must learn what works and put those features in front of customers, employees, and other users.

    The process of conducting a Developer Toil audit includes:

    1. Asking the right questions: A great way to uncover developer toil is to ask about people’s struggles, frustrations, and even boredom in the form of a tailored question set. We advise using questions that are specific to your organization in addition to general questions like “how long does it take to perform a full build?” For example, highly regulated organizations should ask about tasks involving compliance. Once the survey is completed, you can do some quick analysis to locate and prioritize developer toil.

    2. Combine into usable metrics: You now have a single metric for each type of developer toil. And by combining all the questions you create a single metric to track overall developer toil. Extra points for creating dashboards with visualizations! As with all such aggregate metrics, these are more directional than exacting—their job is to point you to problems that should be solved.

    3. Link these metrics to business value: A simple ranking of developer toil is better than nothing. However, before deciding which developer toil to address, we recommend linking each type of developer toil to the business value created by fixing the toil. Put briefly, the value you get will be related to the time saved, and, thus, the ability to ship more features in the future.

    The less time developers spend on toil, the more time they can spend on tasks that directly benefit the business. Another way of looking at this is plain old productivity: Developers can now do more with the same amount of time.

    Another important outcome is increased staff morale. The less time developers spend on boring, repetitive work—toil—the happier they’ll be. Stronger employee hiring ability and retention are (or should be) a strategic imperative for any organization that depends on software. Morale also increases software quality: happier people make better software.

    Slow Down to Speed Up

    With the survey results in hand, you should have a pretty good idea of which developer toil to fix. The last step is to do the usual product management prioritizing to weight fixing these items with other tasks you could do. These are strategic decisions that product managers need to make. To fix toil, you need to stop shipping features to free up time. You need to slow down the business. At the start, before product managers have been empowered to make these kinds of decisions, higher-level management should be involved to calibrate how much slow down you’re willing to put up with for future agility. The calibration you’re doing is this: If I fix one item of toil and ship just one feature (instead of two) this release cycle, then in the next release cycle I can ship four features. Humans are not great at that kind of bird-in-the-hand versus birds-in-the-bush thinking, so you’ll need to figure out what works in your organization.

    Through our experience as consultants working with product teams in different industries, we’ve used Developer Toil Audits to focus and motivate product managers and developers to fix toil and speed up their release cycles and, thus, improve how their organizations build software. This directly improves the business by adding more capabilities and capacity to deliver more features, even in the short term. Each time you fix any technical debt, you gain more capacity and capabilities to create new features and improve your software. This is how you use a modern software culture to increase business agility. Or, put more simply: Less developer toil leads to better software, and better software leads to better business.

  • The Real ROI of DevOps

    The Real ROI of DevOps

    Many established enterprises are stuck in reverse. Dragged down by legacy IT systems and sclerotic software workstreams, these businesses simply cannot adapt and get up to speed in the continuously changing, high-velocity global marketplace of the 21st century. Delta Airlines’ recent technology crash, for example, dramatically illustrates how aging and inflexible IT systems can cripple a company in 2016 and lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue, as well as the dissipation of a hard-won reputation among customers.

    But an increasing number of organizations are accelerating their cultural transformations to become software-led companies that can consistently deliver new products and services as a result of automated and collaborative workflows. Alaska Airlines, which focuses relentlessly on measuring the innovation velocity of its business, is a powerful case in point.

    This is DevOps at work, and it’s how IT must operate to be the business engine of our quicksilver digital economy.

    Measuring the return on investment (ROI) from DevOps is critical to convince organizations falling behind that they can still shift course, transform and head to the IT future. Measuring DevOps ROI is also essential for companies that are embracing the industry’s forward movement, so they know if they’re on the right track and can keep turbo-charging their DevOps efforts.

    The most proactive approach for measuring DevOps ROI is to gauge the impact of products and services on customers. But, to get there, we must also assess and analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of the software development process.

    Which brings us to the one metric that’s truly relevant in business today—velocity. Without velocity, you can’t quickly recognize and remediate problems. More significantly, you’ll fall behind in the marketplace because you can’t innovate fast enough to keep pace with competitors and customer demand.

    Enter DevOps: The culture of innovating at velocity.

    Of course, that’s easy to say, difficult to measure. The real ROI of DevOps is how rapidly you can ship your new ideas to customers—and, importantly, understand if those ideas meet customer needs.

    Many may look at cost savings and headcount as their first DevOps metrics. These are important barometers but don’t measure long-term value back to the business. Two places to start for value-oriented metrics are time to delivery and quality of release.

    Measuring time to delivery shows how long it takes to get new product from code checking to production. Ideally, you want to see your time to delivery drop from months to weeks to days, and then literally to hours and minutes.

    Quality of release reveals how many bugs and errors are found in each iteration of the product. Companies should look to remedy these immediately and to develop a pre-production environment and workflow of automated testing for issues.

    It’s equally important to measure how rapidly you can get feedback from customers and incorporate that into the next development cycle. Development teams must get clear, direct and actionable feedback about whether their products are moving the business forward. For example, did the two-week sprint to build a new landing page for a bank’s website increase customers’ online banking sessions? Did it generate more cross-sell for the bank’s product portfolio? How soon can we see an uptick in customer satisfaction? This is significant information, and the question is, how fast do the developers respond to this feedback?

    The bottom line is that DevOps metrics should always connect back to the business; they need to show a measurable improvement in the customer or staff experience. This could be more quality touchpoints with customers, an improved customer satisfaction score (such as a Net Promoter Score) or increased customer activity in areas such as online billing or account management.

    “Delivering on the final product is key,” says Adam Mikeal, director of Information Technology at the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University. “Your job’s not done if the customer can’t accomplish what they want. If the customer can’t do it, it doesn’t matter if your section of the code was good. The customer experience is all that matters.” 

    Another important part of this equation is measuring your team’s efficiency on the road to velocity. To truly ship ideas at speed, and positively impact your business and its customers, you also need to understand how smoothly your teams are working—in addition to how quickly they’re delivering.

    Banks Cash In on DevOps

    Westpac Bank in New Zealand fully grasps this imperative, for example, and it enacted DevOps practices to deploy a new pricing engine for mortgages in just three months—from concept to customer. In the past, this project would have taken Westpac 18 months.

    Additionally, Westpac measures how well it’s using resources—for every $1 spent on a problem, how much is chewed up by politics and how much actually goes to solving the problem? Before adopting DevOps practices, Westpac was delivering a return of about 20 cents to 22 cents. Now, that number is just shy of 40 cents. That’s a near-2x increase in the value delivery. Westpac’s goal is 3x. In addition, Westpac has increased the amount of work its development teams accomplish by more than 40 percent over the previous year.  

    Like Westpac, Standard Bank in South Africa has boosted efficiency, thanks to a thriving DevOps culture. The cost of production at Standard, for example, has dropped from about $4,000 to $700—a 300 percent improvement.

    The goal for companies in every industry and economic sector around the world today is clear: Accelerate your business so that you create and provide greater—and faster,—value for the customer. But, to drive a robust ROI on this journey, it’s crucial that you carefully measure the true velocity of your organization, whether you’re just beginning with DevOps or you’re well along in the transformation.

    — Justin Arbuckle

  • Last-Mile DevOps: How to Keep Employees Happy

    Last-Mile DevOps: How to Keep Employees Happy

    Chances are that your company is embracing DevOps to make sure you can get fresh, new digital capabilities to your customers ASAP. That’s because in today’s market, you either have to be first—or quickly close any gaps between you and your more digitally innovative competitors.

    But when it comes to getting new capabilities into the hands of your own employees, things probably move much slower. That’s because your internally facing apps have to clear a hurdle that your customer-facing apps don’t: administration of access privileges that often are poorly defined and inadequately automated.

    That’s a problem. People can’t be productive if they don’t have access rights for the IT resources they need, when they need them. The growing Millennial workforce is going to be especially unhappy if IT is slow to meet their digital needs. And from a security perspective, slow administration of access privileges is also a problem—because your company must be able to automatically and immediately revoke employee access privileges the moment they’re fired or they quit.

    This automated, accelerated management of internal users’ access rights is the missing “last mile” for DevOps. And it’s something you have to address if you’re going to fulfill the needs of the business with the same excellence as you fulfill the expectations of your customers.

    What Makes the Last Mile So Tough?

    If you bank with Chase or ride with Uber, your access to your personal data is gated by your personal login. But, as a customer, you essentially use the same app as everyone else.

    Application privileges within your own company are entirely different for two reasons:

    • Privileges for your internal workforce are much more complex than for customers. Salespeople have sales apps. Your finance department uses finance systems. Your service reps may be allowed to see RMA numbers, but not SSNs. So you must quickly give each person access to only the resources appropriate to their specific role and responsibilities—or risk consequences that include lost productivity, security breaches, compliance failures and excess software licensing costs.
    • Management of internal privileges is an ongoing activity. Productivity, security and compliance demand that you provision each user account for each application with the right privileges at the right time. Privileges must be immediately and appropriately modified every time an employee is promoted or transferred. Privileges must be terminated immediately when someone leaves your company. Privileges may also have to be temporarily modified in real time due to session context—such as use of non-secure public WiFi or an access attempt from a questionable location or at a questionable time.

    Simply put, for internally facing apps, getting code onto a production server isn’t enough. You also need to automate and accelerate management of the “last mile” between servers and employees.

    What Are ‘Last-Mile’ DevOps Requirements?

    DevOps toolchains automate and monitor the software life cycle from design and development through testing and deployment on a production server. What’s missing is automated provisioning and governance of the “last mile” between the server and the individual worker.

    These tasks include:

    • Capture of current user role/responsibility profiles from HR
    • Provisioning of application-specific accounts with profile-appropriate privileges and controls
    • Self-service inputs from authorized LOB managers
    • Detection of session context (network connection, time of day, location, etc.)
    • Real-time modification of privileges based on that session context
    • Automated revocation of access privileges upon termination, transfer, etc.
    • Employee self-service for permitted optional applications and services
    • Monitoring and reporting on employee account activities and events

    Your team probably performs many of these “last mile” tasks manually. Some may also be automated using homegrown scripts. Excessive dependency on scripts is a bad practice, though. Scripts usually are poorly understood by anyone but the original writer—which makes them difficult to maintain and update over time. They also don’t typically integrate well with DevOps, HR systems or other key pieces of the app delivery puzzle. This lack of integration slows your processes down and opens the door for human error.

    Automation of last-mile DevOps makes much more sense. Automation speeds processes, reduces cost and optimizes accuracy. Integrated automation also gives you a dependable, centralized point-of-control for defining and editing policies—as well as for capturing the event logs necessary for compliance and security reporting. The right automation solution will also integrate with the rest of your operations environment (including directories, VDI, and mobile management tools) to ensure secure, reliable application access.

    Why is ‘Last-Mile’ DevOps Important?

    Most business leaders already understand why rapid rollout of customer-facing applications is so important. Unfortunately, many fail to recognize the importance of being just as fast and accurate when it comes to supporting their own workforce.

    The truth, however, is that automation of last-mile DevOps benefits your business in several important ways:

    • Improved employee productivity and engagement. Your workforce will be much more productive and more engaged when everyone has immediate access to the digital tools they need. That improved employee performance will benefit your customers as well.
    • Higher IT efficiency. The sooner you automate the many everyday service provisioning tasks that your skilled IT staff now performs manually, the sooner they can to shift their precious time and energy from routine work to higher-value projects.
    • Enhanced security and compliance. Well-defined access policies, diligent enforcement of those policies with rules-based automation and centralized logging of access provisioning activities all reduce your IT-related risks—as does immediate, automatic and complete revocation of all access privileges the moment any employee or contractor is terminated.
    • Reduced “Shadow IT.” When IT is more responsive to people’s needs, they are far less inclined to turn to alternative digital resources that aren’t properly monitored, governed or secured.
    • Greater business agility. M&A, reorgs and other organizational moves are chronically bottlenecked by manual execution of mass changes to the workforce’s digital access privileges. Rules-based automation of last-mile DevOps eliminates this agility-killing process friction.

    The bottom line: To achieve true digital agility, your company must automate the “last-mile” tasks that give your people access to the IT resources they need—when they need them.

    About the Author / Stacy Leidwinger

    stacy-leidwingerStacy is the VP of Products at RES where she is responsible for defining overall product direction, roadmap and positioning, to drive product excellence, company growth and customer success in the areas of end user computing and security. Her background is in both product marketing and product management helping to positioning B2B software companies for growth and market leadership. Prior to RES, Stacy led the product management team at Directworks, a cloud-based sourcing and supplier management solution. Before Directworks, she managed the roadmap, product positioning, and go-to-market strategy for Vivisimo, an enterprise search solution, which was acquired by IBM. While at IBM, Stacy was responsible for the integration of Vivisimo’s product line into IBM’s big data portfolio. Connect with her on LinkedIn / Twitter.

  • DevOps Sometimes Means Kill It Before Fixing It

    DevOps Sometimes Means Kill It Before Fixing It

    The public attention for DevOps is having a very positive effect on many areas of IT with regard to improving their ability to deliver for the business. Yet, I see little attention being paid to an integral part of this desire to change, which is to assess and baseline the current approach and then strategically select those areas where attention needs to be paid. Alternatively stated, many DevOps efforts are focused on improving current approaches without even determining if the current approach is appropriate for the business.

    In their book, “The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions,” the authors question the focus on productivity as an aspect of implementing lean or agile methods. This comes up quite often in discussion with customers regarding DevOps adoption. There’s a misconception that becoming more productive is the way to fulfill demand from the business. But productivity is not the right question or answer. Regardless how you approach the problem domain lack of infinite resources—money, time and people—the demand will typically exceed the ability to fulfill.

    The way for IT to help the business achieve agility is to deliver the right set of features at the right time, which means the first step has to be looking at what you’re doing today and being willing to stop spending time and effort where there is minimal value or gain. The authors of “The Lean Mindset” have some interesting anecdotes around the realities surrounding this in enterprise settings.

    • Politics – one company decided to financially incent development management to deliver agreed upon features on a behind schedule project even though it meant that testing would suffer and the final product would be unreliable. When later asked if they could have reduced the feature set and delivered fewer high-quality features, the team stated that it could have been done as less than 50% of the features were being used in the final deliverable anyway. The politics of delivering what was agreed upon was more important than delivering fewer high-quality features.
    • Can’t Say No! – many IT executives find it difficult to push back on the business and, hence, end up attempting to deliver all that is already on their plate plus new requests that arise during the year. In many cases, much of what is already on their plate is no longer needed or provides minimal value to the business. Without a system of measurement around cost to deliver versus value delivered, IT cannot justify to the business the need to shift resources elsewhere to ensure optimal value.

    For these reasons, among others, any attempt at DevOps needs to start with an understanding for where resources are being applied today and where they should be applied in the future. Doing useless stuff faster doesn’t help IT and it doesn’t help the business. It’s also why IT/Business alignment is a critical part of any DevOps adoption strategy. IT needs to work with the business in an open manner to select the most important features, capabilities, systems, etc. that will deliver value for the business. This also means IT is responsible for instituting the necessary systems to measure resource consumption and provide the business with the necessary data for them to make intelligent choices about where they want to spend their IT capital.

    There’s a great Peter Drucker quote in the book, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” So, if your IT Operations team spends six weeks automating deployment for a system that really should have been sunset, that’s six weeks lost that could have been better spent on a more business critical function. Of note, this is not the IT Operations’ fault. If that system is not going to be sunset and has been the bane of their existence consuming time due to outages, then they have driven improvement. The failure is on IT management and the business having not taken the necessary steps to allow these resources to be focused on more important initiatives once again illustrating the importance of executive sponsorship for DevOps initiatives prior to tooling, automation, process improvement or organizational shifts.

  • DevOps cuts out the unnecessary middle-man

    DevOps cuts out the unnecessary middle-man

    How many IT people does it take to produce an application? Actually, let me rephrase that. How many IT people does it take to produce an application effectively and efficiently? For many organizations, the answer to the second question is less than the answer to the first because the traditional IT hierarchy includes layers of middle-manager decision makers that weigh everything down.

    One of the things that DevOps helps companies accomplish is to eliminate unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles so the people trying to get things done can just do what they know how to do. The traditional IT model reminds me a little of putting a police officer in the middle of an intersection to direct traffic when there are already stoplights or stop signs present. Every licensed driver already knows the proper protocols and procedures for driving collaboratively and sharing the road so that everyone gets safely through the intersection. The police officer just disrupts an otherwise smooth process, and wastes resources that could be put to better use elsewhere—like maybe pulling over that car going 75mph in a 45mph zone, but I digress.

    For some reason, it is a fairly normal, natural evolution for a business to add layers of middle-management decision makers as it grows. Sometimes those roles are a function of wanting to promote people when there is really nowhere to promote them to, and the role makes sense at the time. In fact, the initial creation of many such roles is actually intended to help the business operate more efficiently. An upper manager starts to get too much on his plate, and delegates power to intermediaries so that decisions can be made at a lower level, and the upper manager’s lack of availability doesn’t become a roadblock to progress.

    Over time, though, middle managers become a cancer on the organization. The need for the role typically fades away, and you’re left with people in unnecessary roles going out of their way to justify their own existence by asserting themselves and making sure everything goes through them. When big companies like Microsoft or General Motors decide to pare down the company, middle managers are generally first on the chopping block because nobody can even explain why they’re there in the first place.

    That’s where DevOps comes in. By its very nature, DevOps enables teams to function more autonomously and take responsibility for their own work. It accomplishes the same goal that originally justified creating middle-manager roles—it moves decision-making power to a lower level so that scarce upper managers don’t become obstacles for productivity. DevOps does it by bringing decision-making power down to the trenches where those involved understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, though, rather than adding an extra layer of red tape that ultimately ends up adding, rather than removing obstacles.

    Like drivers approaching an intersection, the people doing the actual work have a firm grasp on what’s supposed to happen. They understand how things work, and what needs to happen to get things done. The traditional middle-manager hierarchy is like the unnecessary police officer “directing” traffic, while a DevOps approach treats the drivers like sentient adults, and assumes they all know what a stop sign or a green light mean without being told.

    In the end, it may add to our employment challenges. The US is already experiencing a shift away from manufacturing jobs as a result of technology and automation making workers obsolete. If we also decide collectively that middle managers are obsolete, we end up with more people without a job. That is unfortunate, and it is a problem that will need to be solved, but businesses can’t solve it by creating unnecessary roles just to give people something to do.

    For younger organizations that have embraced DevOps concepts since inception, DevOps should help prevent the cancer of middle managers. If teams and individuals are given responsibility for themselves, there is no need to create an additional babysitter role to police them. For established organizations that already have middle managers, eliminating those roles creates a natural vacuum where DevOps concepts can flourish if allowed.

    Regardless of how organizations get there, the result of embracing DevOps is that the middle-man is removed from the equation so development occurs more effectively, and more efficiently with fewer people.