Intro to JohnTellsAll: Dev, DevOps, and Quality

John Tells All Intro

Hi everyone! My name is John Mitchell, and I'm a Dev/DevOps Engineer in California. After years of Dev and Web experience, I switched to DevOps and Cloud work over the last decade.

This blog is aimed at Developers, DevOps people, and Business.

I've developed a lot of ideas around Dev, DevOps, and Quality. "Quality" I define as the Business expectation of our work. Each group has a specific, limited viewpoint. Each group interacts with the others, but can easily get confused. Misaligned expectations cause problems.

The following is a rough index of screencasts and articles in production:

Fast Developers

(Feature) Developers build out Business features in code. "Speed" means latency between updating a feature and getting feedback on the change. Sometimes the change "works" and we can move on to a different feature. More often the change fails and we try again with a slightly different change.

Feature code is mostly stateless, so we can build extremely fast feedback loops using local unit tests. Also, test automation creates high (business-focused) quality, at the expense of speed.

Feature code uses environments, pipelines, and other resources generally managed by DevOps.

• article: "Fast Development: Speed and Quality"
  • Run tests with Entr
  • Write feedback loop before code, e.g. Test First (TDD)
  • Use CPU not brains
    • Assert 0
    • Dev via repl
  • AI: sharp knife

Fast DevOps

DevOps Engineers support Developers by creating and managing resources, like databases and networks. They also create and maintain the CI/CD pipeline.

DevOps tasks are always stateful, and often much slower than Developer tasks.

• article: "Fast DevOps: Feedback from State"
  • Auto-plan using Entr
  • Feedback at multiple levels
• compare: DevOps with multiple feedback loops, e.g. with Terraform

Fast Startup

Feedback loops aren't just for Engineering. There's lots of non-technical feedback metrics we use to grow our company

• Developer Experience (DX) features -- speed -- are business features
  • create, track, and implement DX features like any others, don't ignore them!
  • like investments in test automation, DX creates biz value forever
• Product-Market Fit
• Post-deploy feedback
  • business and marketing interact directly with users
  • A/B Testing
  • Feature Flags

• JTA: Speed x Quality

  • with investment, Speed can create Quality
  • reference: Charity Majors / Honeycomb

• Value Stream Map

  • high level, for business and eng discussion
  • visualize, measure, and communicate the delivery/value path
  • enables radical optimization and biz/eng alignment

• JTA: Deploy-Value Map

  • lower level, tech version of Value Stream Map
  • shows effort, products, and feedback for each audience
  • Deploy Map: Dev -> PR -> Staging -> Prod
  • For each step, 1) change latency, 2) feedback latency, 3) feedback value

Feedback Loops

Feedback Loops exist everywhere, not just for
Dev/DevOps of course. Here are general resources:

• PDSA: Deming's feedback cycle enabled Japan's explosive postwar growth
• Scientific Method
• alt: Grit, Ericsson
• Gladwell's "10k hours to master anything" needs refinement
• JTA: A-PDSA: after product created, what does that enable?

Community

If you're interested in Dev, DevOps, and Quality, reach out to me! I'm happy to connect.

John Tells All resources

• Follow my dev.to account
• If you're an old-school Dev there's lots of stuff on johntellsall.com
• Tweet at me @ JohnTellsAll
• John Tells All YouTube channel

References (my YouTube videos)

• DevOps with multiple feedback loops, e.g. with Terraform
• high level quality visualization ideas -- Platonic Solids of Quality
  • Agile Quadrants (Crispin, Gregory, Marick)
  • Test Automation Pyramid
  • Feedback Loops
• Pomodoro is Agile
• Extended Test Pyramid

Photo by Federico Respini on Unsplash