Is There a Threshold Base for Reliability?

In part two of this two-part episode on The DevOpsHandbook, Second Edition, Gene Kim speaks with coauthors Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble about the past and current state of DevOps. Forsgren and Humble share with Kim their DevOps aha moments and what has been the most interesting thing they’ve learned since the book was released in 2016.

Jez discusses the architectural properties of the programming language PHP and what it has in common with ASP.NET. He also talks about the anguish he felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, was published while he was working on his book, Continuous Delivery.

Forsgren talks about how it feels to see the findings from the State of DevOps research so widely used and cited within the technology community. She explains the importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance as well as what she's learned about the importance of culture and how it can make or break an organization.

Humble, Forsgren, and Kim each share their favorite case studies in The DevOps Handbook.

ABOUT THE GUEST(S)

Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble are two of five coauthors of The DevOps Handbook along with Gene Kim, Patrick Debois and John Willis.

Forsgren, PhD, is a Partner at Microsoft Research. She is coauthor of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and The DevOps Handbook, 2nd Ed., and is best known as lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a successful entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), professor, performance engineer, and sysadmin. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Humble is co-author of Lean Enterprise, the Jolt Award-winning Continuous Delivery, and The DevOps Handbook. He has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in companies of varying sizes across three continents, most recently working for the US Federal Government at 18F. As well as serving as DORA’s CTO, Jez teaches at UC Berkeley.

YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT

• Projects Jez and Gene worked on together before The DevOps Handbook came out.
• What life is like for Jez as a site reliability engineer at Google and what he’s learned.
• The story behind his DevOps aha moment in 2004, working on a large software project involving 70 developers.
• The architectural properties of his favorite programming language PHP, what it has in common with ASP.NET, and the importance of being able to get fast feedback while building something.
• The anguish that Jez felt when Mike Nygard’s book, Release It!, came out, wondering if there was still a need for the book he was working on, which was Continuous Delivery.
• “Testing on the Toilet” and other structures for creating distributed learning across an organization and why this is important to create a genuine learning dynamic.
• What Dr. Forsgren is working on now as Partner of Microsoft Research.
• Some of Dr. Forsgren’s goals as we work together on the State of DevOps research and how it feel to have those findings so widely used and cited within the technology community.
• The importance of finding the link between technology performance and organizational performance and why it probably was so elusive for at least 40 years in the research community.
• What Dr. Forsgren has learned about the importance of culture, how it can make or break an organization, and the importance of great leadership.

RESOURCES

• Personal DevOps Aha Moments, the Rise of Infrastructure, and the DevOps Enterprise Scenius: Interviews with The DevOps Handbook Coauthors (Part 1 of 2: Patrick Debois and John Willis)
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, Second Edition, by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis, Jez Humble, and Dr. Nicole Forsgren
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
• Nudge vs Shove: A Conversation With Richard Thaler
• The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps by Kevin Behr, Gene Kim and George Spafford
• FlowCon
• Elisabeth Hendrickson on the Idealcast: Part 1, Part 2
• Cloud Run
• Beyond Goldilocks Reliability by Narayan Desai, Google
• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael T. Nygard
• DevOps Days
• On the Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles by Elisabeth Hendrickson at FlowCon San Francisco 2013
• Bret Victor
• Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor
• Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
• Douglas Engelbart and The Mother of All Demos
• 18F
• Pain Is Over, If You Want It at DevOps Enterprise Summit - San Francisco 2015
• Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture by Mike Bland
• Do Developers Discover New Tools On The Toilet? by Emerson Murphy-Hill, Edward Smith, Caitlin Sadowski, Ciera Jaspan, Collin Winter, Matthew Jorde, Andrea Knight, Andrew Trenk and Steve Gross PDF
• Study: DevOps Can Create Competitive Advantage
• DevOps Means Business by Nicole Forsgren Velasquez, Jez Humble, Nigel Kersten and Gene Kim
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
• DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) on Google Cloud
• GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public
• Paul Strassmann
• The Idealcast with Dr. Ron Westrum: Part 1, Part 2
• Building the Circle of Faith: How Corporate Culture Builds Trust at Trajectory Conference 2021
• The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
• Maslach Burnout Inventory
• Understanding Job Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas 2018
• Understanding Job Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - London 2019
• Workplace Engagement Panel at DevOps Enterprise Summit - Las Vegas 2019
• Expert Panel - Workplace Engagement & Countering Employee Burnout at DevOps Enterprise Summit - London 2019
• The Idealcast with Trent Green
• Kelly Shortridge’s tweets about Gitlab S-1

TIMESTAMPS

[05:22] Intro

[05:34] Meet Jez Humble

[10:19] What Jez is working on these days

[15:56] What inform his book, “Continuous Delivery”

[24:02] Assembling the team for the project

[26:30] At what point was PHP an important property

[31:56] The most surprising thing since the DevOps Handbook came out

[35:07] His favorite pattern that went into the DevOps Handbook

[43:40] What DevOps worked on in 2021

[44:46] Meet Dr. Nicole Forsgren

[50:32] What Dr. Forsgren is working on these days

[52:18] What it’s like working at Microsoft Research

[55:58] The response to the state of DevOps findings

[59:18] The most surprising finding since the findings release

[1:05:59] Her favorite pattern that influence performance

[1:08:49] How Dr. Forsgren met Dr. Ron Westrum

[1:11:06] The most important thing she’s learned in this journey

[1:14:46] Her favorite case study in the DevOps Handbook

[1:19:12] Dr. Christina Maslach and work burnout

[1:20:46] More context about the case studies

[1:25:32] The Navy case study

[1:29:04] Outro