Continuous Delivery and DevOps：A Quickstart Guide

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Defining the rules

With any examination, expose, investigation, or inspection there will be, to some degree, dirt that will need to be dug up—figuratively speaking. This is inevitable and should not be taken lightly or treated flippantly. The sort of questions that will be asked will include the following:

Why are things done in certain ways?
Who came up with this process in the first place?
Who makes the priority decisions to do one thing over another and what right to they have to make the decision?
When exactly are these decisions made?
Who owns the overall product delivery process?
Who owns the various steps within the process?
Has anyone previously questioned the process? If so, what happened?

Does anyone actually know how the process works end to end?
Why can't the management see the obvious issues and why don't they listen to us?

These types of questions may well make some people very uncomfortable and may bring to light facts that produce emotive responses or emotional reactions—especially from those that may have originally had a hand in designing and/or implementing the very process that you are putting under scrutiny. Even if they can see and understand that the process they nurtured is broken, they still may have an emotional attachment to it—especially if they have been involved for a long time. You need to be mindful that these self-same people may be needed to help replace and/or refine the process, so tread carefully.

To keep things on a purely professional level, you should map out some ground rules that clearly define what the investigation is for and what its goal is. These need to be clear, concise, and easy for everyone involved to understand and worded in a positive way. The sorts of things you should be looking at are as follows:

We're trying to understand how the end to end process as it stands came to be
We need to understand what business/legislative/legal constraints there are
We need to see how the many and varied process link together to form the end to end process
We need to verify if our process(es) actually work for us and the wider business
We want to surface issues and problems so that everyone can see them and help fix them
We want to make things better

To further ensure you minimize the emotional reactions, you should define some rules of engagement so that everyone involved understands where the line is and when it is about to be crossed. Again, keeping these rules simple, concise, and using positive language will help everyone understand and remember them. Good examples would include the following:

No naming and shaming
No personal attacks or witch hunting
This is not a post mortem
There are no right or wrong answers
No detail is too trivial
Stick to facts over fiction
Leave egos at the door

Retrospection can be a powerful tool to gain a greater understanding of what can be improved, but if used incorrectly it can cause more trouble than good—you can shoot yourself in the foot many, many times if you approach this without some foresight. You need to make sure you know what you are letting yourself in for, before you embark on this sort of activity.

Let's now consider who you will need to be involved with and who will add the most value. Hopefully, this will be one and the same, but it's not always that simple or obvious.