It was good to engage again with the DevOps community at DOES 2019 in Las Vegas.

The theme for DOES 2019 was “Get together and go faster,” and the IBM booth was the location for getting together to discuss velocity with quality.

State Farm and value stream mapping

State Farm shared a very interesting story about their journey to DevOps called “Damming the 97-year-old waterfall,” starting with one of their early value stream maps from 2005.

I know many customers who would have liked to have been as advanced as StateFarm in 2005! Indeed, many of the attendees that spoke to me at the IBM Booth asked how they can ‘do’ DevOps. They had differing levels of automation but didn’t feel they were ‘doing’ DevOps. 

My answer to each of them was to start with value stream mapping. Automation is required to capture and analyze the data from multiple tools across the delivery pipeline. When the state of the delivery is visualized, you can identify bottlenecks. Removing those bottlenecks is ‘doing’ DevOps.

Al Wagner from IBM gave an excellent talk on automating value stream mapping using IBM UrbanCode Velocity, IBM’s flagship solution for finding bottlenecks, coordinating releases across applications with quality gates, and capturing metrics across toolchains.

The relationship between IT and business

Another prevalent theme was the maturing relationship between IT and business. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ presentation on “An Honest Conversation between IT and Business“ about their move from decentralized paper processes to integrated electronic processes highlighted the challenges and value of effective collaboration. I have several customers wanting to improve their collaboration and the sharing of development assets. Rosalind Radcliff’s talk expanded on this theme by talking about Infrastructure as Code and highlighted the unique challenges for Z/os.

Predominantly attended by DevOps executives and managers (and quite a few unicorns to celebrate the launch of Gene Kim’s new book‚ The Unicorn Project) the event highlighted the need for a tool-based foundation for DevOps to orchestrate the delivery pipeline, automate the assessment of quality, and make information about the state of delivery and quality available to both business and development stakeholders.

Get in touch to learn more

Do you have a desire to speed up the flow of software deliverables through their delivery pipeline and would like to learn how IBM DevOps can help you orchestrate your delivery pipeline?

Have a concern about the quality of releases and/or the impact of quality assessment activities during your delivery lifecycle and would like to learn how IBM DevOps can help you to continuously assess your quality with test automation?

Do you think you may have bottlenecks in your development and delivery process and would like to learn how IBM DevOps can help you visualise and optimize your delivery processes?

If so, please drop me an email at james.hunter@uk.ibm.com.