DevOps & Processes
One common mistake I see in almost every engagement that involves legacy
processes is a lack of focus and analysis of those legacy processes before pro-
ceeding with automation. As a result, enterprises are automating waste and
not realizing the benefits of agility they were expecting. This is often the result
of silos and mismatched incentives across those silos. Developers will work in
their own silo and implement CI/CD. They see great improvements in both
time and quality of their build process but often see little to no change to their
time to market metrics. Why is that? Because there are 20 to 30 years of legacy
change control processes created in the era of biannual releases that have not
been addressed.
I have seen numerous instances where red tape can mire the process for weeks
or months prior to being able to perform an automated build, followed by more
weeks and months of red tape in order to promote the code to production after
the automated build. Yet teams still focus solely on perfecting CI/CD.
If you have ever read Eliyahu Goldratt’s, The Goal, you will have learned that
working on the wrong bottlenecks does not improve the overall flow of a sys-
tem. Instead it moves the bottleneck to another part of the system. If enter-
prises only implement CI/CD without performing a value stream assessment
of the complete system, they will only move bottlenecks from the build process
to another part of the system, thus never achieving the desired agility. Engi-
68 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2017