The Cloud has transformed how we think about software quality. Instead of preventing failures, we must focus on automatic recovery from failure. In other words, resilience trumps traditional quality measures. Continuous delivery models further squeeze traditional notions of quality. Remember the venerable project management Iron Triangle? Among time, scope, and cost, you can only fix two or quality will suffer. Only in today's DevOps world, continuous testing, integration, and deployment upend the time metric, the DevOps cadence reinvents project scope, and cost metrics expand past software development to the total cost of ownership of the end-to-end digital initiative. It's time to discard the Iron Triangle and reinvent it for today's digital world. Introducing the DevOps Drumbeat: balancing continuous testing, integration, and delivery with resilience, flexibility, and technical debt becomes the central quality challenge of today's DevOps-driven digital efforts.

1. Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC
1
The DevOps
Drumbeat
Reinventing the Iron
Triangle
Jason Bloomberg
President
jason@intellyx.com
@theebizwizard

2. About Jason Bloomberg
• President of Intellyx
• Advise companies on their digital
transformation initiatives & help vendors
communicate their agility stories
• Run Bloomberg Agile Architecture
Certification course around the world
• Write for Forbes & Wired on
Digital Transformation
• Buy my latest book,
The Agile Architecture
Revolution
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3. The Iron Triangle
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4. Quality: The Fourth
Corner
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PhotoCredit:CraigBrown-http://www.betterprojects.net/2009/03/it-used-to-be-iron-triangle.html

5. What about Agility?
• Business agility is a
metarequirement
• Requirement that
requirement change
must be supported
• Balance quality and
agility
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PhotoCredit:THORhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/geishaboy500/
Requirement: Make the
Organization More Agile

6. Agile Architecture Quality
Star
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7. Best-Effort Quality
• Quality takes time, limiting
agility
• Insufficient agility lowers quality
• Need to rethink approach to
quality
• Preventing adverse behavior less
important than automatic
recovery from such behavior
– Core Cloud architecture principle
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Resilience More Important than
Being Defect-Free
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8. Resilience
• The ability to respond
quickly and efficiently to
negative change in the
business environment
– Managing risk
– Bouncing back from
adverse events
– Disaster recovery
• Tactical business driver
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The opposite of brittleness

9. Fit-for-Purpose Often
Means Brittle
• Agile software built
intentionally with only
today’s needs in mind
• Planning for unexpected
contingencies contrary to
Agile approach
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Brittle software leads to brittle
organizations
PhotoCredit:VeganFeastCateringhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/veganfeast/

10. The Goal of Agile
Software
• Requirement to build software that responds to
changing requirements
• Inherent flexibility vs. rapid development &
deployment
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11. DevOps & AA Quality Star
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12. The DevOps Cadence
• Coordination of multiple
iterations/sprints across
multiple “projects”
• Agile approach to
project/program management
at enterprise level
• (Good) technical debt may
cross iterations/sprints
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PhotoCredit:ScottEdmundshttps://www.flickr.com/photos/30557460@N05/

13. Bad vs. Good Technical
Debt
• Bad technical debt
– Sloppy code you
have to clean up
later
– Rarely if ever a good
thing
• Good technical debt
– Intentional missing functionality or simplifications
– Represented in backlog
– Essential part of Agile/DevOps approach
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14. DevOps Drumbeat
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15. The Design-Time Testing
Conundrum
• The more dynamic and distributed
the deployment environment, the
less design-time QA can catch
problems
• Testing increasingly in production
– At system level
• Automated rollback/graceful
degradation essential to DevOps
model
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Quality focus shifts to
resilience
PhotoCredit:r.nialbradshawhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/zionfiction/

16. Good Technical Debt vs.
Resilience Tradeoff
• Resilience discussion
focuses on risk
mitigation
– Cost of mitigation vs.
predicted cost of
adverse event
• Do you take a shortcut
on resilience or on
functionality?
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17. DevOps Cadence vs. Iron
Triangle
• Iron Triangle context:
discrete software projects
• DevOps context:
continuous delivery &
integration across
multiple, ongoing sprints
• Scope shifts forward or
backward as necessary
– Reflected as incurring or
paying technical debt
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PhotoCredit:kDamohttps://www.flickr.com/photos/kdamo/

18. The Overbuilding Paradox
• How do stakeholders know
what flexibility they will
require?
• How generalized should
code be?
• When to build capabilities
vs. when to build
affordances?
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PhotoCredit:IshikawaKenhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/chidorian/19898378/sizes/l
Trade off building & changing
software quickly for
inherent flexibility

19. Capabilities vs.
Affordances
• Capability
– Ability to perform or
achieve certain
outcomes through
features or functions
– Apps have capabilities
• Affordance
– A property of an object which allows an individual
to perform an action
– Tools have affordances
– Depends upon how user wants to use tool
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PhotoCredit:EraPhernaliaVintagehttps://www.flickr.com/photos/eraphernalia_vintage/3034341310/sizes/o/

20. What are You Writing?
• Code?
– Least flexible, most susceptible to overbuilding,
reuse always a challenge
• Metadata via declarative programming?
– Abstracts code, but leads to complexity shell game
• Abstract models?
– Essential for
implementable
Agile Architecture,
but vendors
largely fall short
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21. The Agility Platform
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Your
Application
Your
Application
Application-
Building Tool
Your
Application
Application-
Building Tool
Tool-Building
Platform
Maximize Affordances

22. Coding for a Declarative
Model
• Avoid declarative shell game
– Pushing all the
complexity to the
configuration
(declarative model)
• Configuration should be
– Standards-based
– Browser UI friendly
– Simple
– Consistent
• Code should focus on affordances
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PhotoCredit:TheodoreScotthttps://www.flickr.com/photos/theodorescott/4516759806/sizes/o/

23. Tool-Building Agility
Platform: Maximum
Affordance
• Instead of software that
can do things, want
software that can enable
users to do things
– Maximize affordances
– Software smart enough to
afford any action
• Computers are examples
of maximum affordance
• Build software with the
same purpose
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PhotoCredit:MahenderGhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/gmahender/

24. Working with Abstract
Models
• Abstracts choice
of schema
• Abstracts choice
of API contract
• Abstracts
semantic context
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PhotoCredit:TonyCalrnshttps://www.flickr.com/photos/tonycairns/14731782052/sizes/l
Resolve to logical models at run time

25. Supporting Abstract
Models in Software
• Tool-building platform
(business agility platform)
– All affordances, affords tool-
building capabilities
• Application-building tool
– Affords application-building
capabilities to non-developers
– Rich UI support
– Non-imperative logic
• Event-driven, process-centric,
and/or rules-based, for
example
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26. The DevOps Big Picture
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27. Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx
jason@intellyx.com
@theebizwizard
Send email NOW to drumbeat@intellyx.com
to download this presentation
Thank You!
Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC