Category: Management

The Triangle of Value

Posted on | by ccadmin

It seems like everyone wants everything these days. They want high quality products and services in the quickest amount of time at the lowest price possible. This is never the case.

I don’t recall people talking about this fundamental concept very often that is The triangle of value. It’s also known by many other names. This is a basic resource constraint when you are offering a product or service.

The triangle of value is this:

You have Time, Cost and Quality – Pick two.

You can have a low cost product very quickly but the quality suffers.

You can have a high quality product relatively quickly but it will be very expensive.

You can have a high quality product at a low cost but it will take lots of time to develop.

This is true of project management and DevOps as well. At the end of the day, these are the three elements you have to work with.

Open source products also work like this. You can have a low cost product (it’s free…so to speak) which is high quality with many features, but it gets done on donated time. It may take some time before a bug is corrected or a new features are added.

Other things that affect the “triangle of value”

Skill and Experience

Skill can reduce the amount of time it takes to make something and it can also affect quality of a product or service. Then again, you will pay more money for an individual with a higher skillset especially if you want to keep them around.

Technology

It can be something that decreases the amount of time you spend on producing a product or service. It can be in the form of automation or another catalytic process. At the end of the day, all advancements of technology are catalysts for getting more stuff out of a process. On the other hand, technology can take time and expertise to develop. This also can cost more money for better tech.

How does this understanding play into DevOps or anywhere else?

In an ideal world, you may be able to hire the brightest minds who are up to the task, have the best equipment, plenty of lead time for getting to market and an unlimited budget…but this is not the case.

It may be more like, you only could hire 2 of the 5 positions for experienced programmers (maybe your one of them) and they aren’t that bright (they just think they are), you have second hand equipment that is a few years old, your budget is a quarter of what you were promised and last week was when you had to get the project done.

That’s ok, these are the reality of the industry. You do with what you can the best you can, the same principles apply.

If you don’t have enough manpower, you make it up with overtime and finding leverage somewhere…maybe automation.

If you don’t have the latest equipment, let’s say it’s slow…you make it up by getting more of the older equipment and use them in parallel using some clever programming and networking.

If you have a short lead time, you loosen your “quality” regiment (as in hope your developers don’t make mistakes writing code by forgoing tests) to save on the time you spend in development.

DevOps CI/CD the “Holy Grail” may be a lofty goal to achieve if your resources are limited, but it is a worthwhile and doable. It may take some time to figure out how to do it and to build and train the resources to do this.

At the end of the day, what you most value is what you will get. You can’t have it all but you can choose what you can live with.

I am open to feedback and any suggestions you may have. Until then, have a good day.

Testing for DevOps – How to have 10 deploys a day versus 10 emergencies a day

Posted on | by ccadmin

Ten deploys a day was the tech talk that started DevOps as an integrated practice for software development. However, if they simply pushed out code without checking it, then the story would have been different. Without testing the code, it would be more like 10 or more Disasters a day… A down production site would result in some serious consequences such as:

  • Loss of customers
  • Loss of confidence in the company
  • Loss of employment for all who are involved

You get the pictures. Though the use of automation is a key principle of DevOps, automation is also an efficient way to multiply human error. Without efficient testing of code, CICD would be meaningless. If you write code quickly and deploy it, BUT it’s broken code, well you defeated the purpose of having software rapidly deployed and updated. Testing of code is one of the most fundamental part of DevOps there is.

But I’m a great coder and I don’t make mistakes…(or whatever is your excuse)

Well, that may be the case, however as your software product grows and more people are touching a code, the likelyhood some form of human error (that may not be yours) will be introduced into the code. It’s bad enough when you haven’t worked on the code let’s say in a couple of weeks, you don’t remember what you did. You don’t want to be called back into work on a Friday because your code changes you created bombs out on a production system… Test for it so you can sleep soundly knowing that you have a safety net in place.

Writing tests is a fundamental practice.

The fundamentals – Vince Lombarti, who is know as the winningest coaches in football once went to the lockerroom of his players after they had a major loss from a previous season and said .“..This is a football…” Part of writing good code is writing checks or tests for your code. Unfortunately, many programmers don’t write tests for their code, especially web developers who are use to just writing and fixing it as it breaks. It has been my experience that the reason many programmers don’t test code is quite simply, they don’t know how. We’ll get you pointed the right direction.

What are the various test you can do for code?

There are hundreds of different tests you can do on software, some are appropriate and some are not appropriate for testing your software. Here are a list of some of the more common tests. For the purpose of testing in a DevOps environment, there are basically two categories of test you can do for code. I’ll put particular emphasis on what are the must have tests. We’ll cover the must have tests. We’ll touch on the other tests.

Functional Tests

These are the most basic test we need to have in place for Continuous Integration.

  • Unit testing
  • Integration testing
  • Systems testing
  • Acceptance testing

Non Functional Tests

These are also important tests but are not functional test (testing key functions in software) to have AFTER you have the core functional test in place. Here are a few non functional tests.

  • Security testing – find security holes and exploits in your code.
  • Performance testing – find out how quickly your code runs.
  • Stress testing – find out how much load your application can take before it degrades or breaks.

Behavioral driven testing

This is influenced by BDD – Behavior driven development which is at the core TDD – Test driven development where development of software is defined by very specific test cases. In the case of BDD, the tests are defined in terms of a user story. This affects how you would write unit tests and acceptance tests. Testing frameworks like cucumber support this kind of writing of user stories.

Unit testing

Every bit of function you write should (must) be unit tested. It should be the most basic test that is used with any code that goes into production.

Basic principles of unit testing.

Test the smallest testable part of an application. That is a unittest.

Write your function to handle a particular error – i.e. division by zero.

test fixture – what’s needed to perform a test

Write a test case – 1/0

Write an assertion. Unit test assertion functions are very simple, they are functions that call your function and compares the returned result or state or value. For instance if you function returns a numeric value, you may use an assertion like

functionx > 0

or

assert.greater(functionx, 0)

This is dependent on your framework or library as far as if it supports different conditions for testing assertion.

These tests are best done with a testing frameworks or assertion libaries. For java, there’s JUnit, Python uses unittest, Javascript can use JestJS, MochaJS, Jasmine.

You can read more about unit testing here.

Integration testing

This is also very important. What if the guys who are responsible for writing the database interface makes a change that the busness logic guy didn’t know about or the frontend guys didn’t know about the change in the functions for business logic. Your code justs breaks and that’s not good for your mental health. You can read more about integration testing here.

Acceptance testing

This is what your customer sees and interacts with. This is probably the most time consuming part of writing tests for. Never the less, if the customer is not able to press the “pay” button, you and your company are going to lose money…and that’s not good. Your going to catch this with a good automated testing approach. These days if your testing a web app or website, use selenium or a framework that drive selenium to test the web interface with clicks and data input values. You can record your test using the Selenium IDE in Firefox or Chrome. It will take some massaging of your recording to make a good automated acceptance test.

Depending on your testing strategy, your approach and framework you will use will vary. Regardless of your approach, I’ll always recommend unit testing your code.

Tying it in to DevOps

Continuous integration is a strategy and software testing being both a strategy for instance Behavior driven development with various frameworks as tactics such as cucumber as a framework that supports Behavior driven testing.

Without software testing and a sound testing methodology, you couldn’t have Continuous integration. That is the Holy Grail of DevOps.

I am open to any comments or suggestions to this article. Until then have a good day.

Book Review: Start with Why – by Simon Sinek

Posted on | by ccadmin

What does this have to do with (fill in the blank)?

In the IT field and especially if you are a tech, it’s easy to get in the “weeds” of what you do, and you forget why you do it. It’s when you forget your why that you often have writers block, make bad decisions and you have a hard time getting your ideas and projects from being accomplished.

The book Start With Why was written from a ted talk Simon Sinek did Start with Why.

He outlined as an example how an average computer company would sell computers, I’ll paraphrase:

Average computer company:

We’re GreatComputers company. We do 6 Billion dollars in sales. We make state of the art computers, that are user friendly and powerful.
Buy our computers.

This sounds like every other company and is not very compelling.

Here’s what Apple computer markets itself:

We’re Apple, and we’re against the status quo. We believe in empowering the individual. That’s why we make user friendly computers which are both easy to use and powerful using cutting edge technology. Do you want one?

You may notice, that the content itself hasn’t changed much except for the reason behind the content. This makes the message more compelling.

He gives several examples of this in his book such as Martin Luther King, The Wright Brothers and examples of failures of why such as Tivo and Wallmart that lost it’s why.

The key principle he outlines is the golden circle where its:

why=>how=>what

This golden circle model is based on how the human mind works. The limbic primative brain is where the feeling that drive our actions come from. It is where our hunches and intuitions come from. When people say “It just doesn’t feel right” or wordings to that extent, How and what comes from the outer parts of the brain, the Neo-cortex. This is where our language and logic comes from.
We may have all the intellectual understanding to do something, however if your heart is not in your work or you don’t have any kind of passion to do the work, then things like burnout, anxiety and other stress related problems will creep in. It’s better to do what you believe in than not. Your feelings drive your logic and actions, not the other way around.

Without your why, then how and what become meaningless exercises and your actions and efforts just become a commodity.

How do I use Why in DevOps? (or anywhere else)

The why is what’s behind the strategies that guide your groups and organization. It guides your tactics and helps you build trust in your group. They “buy in” you need to make things work. It is also important for understanding individually why you do those things. For instance, you might get push back from a particular individual in operations for deploying a new software package. You go and talk with him and find out he’s the one who gets all the pages and ends up fixing the new package every weekend. If your able to address his why that is “I don’t get any piece of mind when a new package is deployed” then you remove that resistance and you will get buy-in from him.

Also with a good why, when they buy the why, they will help figure out the technical details. Shared intelligence is better than being the smartest man in the room. If your the smartest man in the room, you are doing all the work. You don’t want to be a micromanager.

Everyone is a leader – Start by leading yourself

Everyone is leading someone. At the end of the day, you are leading yourself. Start with your own why and communicate with yourself why your doing whatever your doing. Then communicate this with everyone else you are working with. It makes it easier for others to work with you and follow along.

This is what I found useful from Start With Why and my main takeaways are:

  • Why – remember why your doing it.
  • Look for peoples whys.
  • Communicate your whys to other people.

Your mileage may vary.

Feel free to give me your comments and suggestions.

Until then, have a good day.

The Elephant in the room – 3 key points of DevOps – Strategy, Tactics and Implemention

Posted on | by ccadmin

Elephant in the room?

When people talk about DevOps, most people don’t know what their talking about or usually they only know part of what is DevOps. The blind men describing an elephant is what comes to mind.

One blind man says he feels it’s like a rope. The second blind man said it’s like a thick branch of a tree. The third blind man said it’s a huge wall.

DevOps is the elephant in the room.

We tend to only “see” one part of the elephant and we view it from our own role or perspective.

For many people, the answer of what is DevOps tends to falls between these kinds of viewpoints:

  • To systems administrators, it’s about use of Automation techniques to manage many machines and deploy code (i.e.Ansible, Kubernetics).
  • To a developer, it is a consistent code development environment and automated integration system (i.e. Docker, Git).
  • To a project manager and stakeholders, it is an Agile development methodology for software and product development.

These answers are both right and wrong at the same time. This is where the understanding of Strategy and Tactics come into play. With this, you can recognize and understand the “elephant in the room” and how to use these tactics and strategies.

The Difference between Strategy and Tactics

The culture and management practices of DevOps can be looked at as the Strategy. The implementation DevOps in the form of tools and processes used are the Tactics. One is at a global level, the other is the “hands on” task(s). Strategies don’t change often. Tactics do change depending on the situation. It’s an important to understand these perspectives to understand what “DevOps” really is.

What is Strategy from the DevOps point of view?

Strategy is the plan to archive a long term goal.  DevOps may employ many different strategies.  Here are a few examples:

These strategies are NOT always going to be appropriate for your shop for a variety of reasons and may need to be modified or other alternative strategies may need to be used.   SCRUM vs Lean?  Up to you and your team.

What is Tactics from the DevOps point of view?

Tactics is the actual methodology of implementation of a strategy.  Depending on your own needs and circumstances, the tactics you chose depend on the strategy your seeking to fulfill. Here are some examples of of tactics:

  • Using a Git shared repository is a tactic for Continuous Integration .
  • Using  Kanban software and workflow is a tactic for Lean software development.
  • Using Ansible to setup standardized servers is the tactic for the “cattle not pets” strategy.
  • Having small team of five people consisting of people from Operations, Development and Quality Assurance is the tactic  for the two pizza team and break down silos strategy.

Tactics may change for different systems you manage.  For instance an MDM (Mobile Device Manager) platform would be the appropriate choice for managing Smartphones NOT Ansible or Chef and in this sort of environment, Docker may not be appropriate for development of the front end app.

Implementation is the key

Even after understating the Strategies of DevOps and developing the Tactics to implement DevOps, if people are not DOING the tasks to implement the tactics,  just doing what they always done, they don’t have a DevOps shop. People need to participate. The place to begin is with collaboration and creating an environment where there is trust and the people involved are actually carrying out the tactics as day to day activities. To get collaboration, people need to have ownership in the project and get recognition for their part. Create an environment where people are willing to take risks and are not afraid of failure. To do this, it’s important that failure is valued as part of the learning process instead of blaming people or finger pointing.  In fact back in the 70’s at IBM, Tom Watson Jr. recounts calling to his office a young executive made a $10 million dollar mistake. Expecting to be fired, the executive presented his letter of resignation. Tom Watson just shook his head:“You are certainly not leaving after we just gave you a $10 million education.” Learning from failure is part of IBM s culture, it should be part of every successful company s culture.

There is NO right way to do this

You can read books like The Phoenix Project or  The Goal (Which The Phoenix Project is based on) and apply the Theory of constraints, or  read any number of books written about DevOps.    However, the original talk they done on 2009 10+ Deploys Per Day , Allspaw and Hammond didn’t do something all that new as these concepts were done by others.  Lean manufacturing is where Kanban and Lean software development came from.   Site Reliability Engineering , which is in principle DevOps, was developed at Google around 2003, well before the Velocity 9 conference.  At Netflix,  they weren’t thinking about DevOps when they developed their “DevOps” shop.
I am of the opinion that you have to examine BOTH the STRATEGIES AND TACTICS of what worked at various organizations and what didn’t and focus on collaboration.  Building a collaborative environment that encourages ownership of a project, gives recognition and encourages people to take risks and not be afraid of failure is the key first step to creating a DevOps shop.  Doing this will make adopting  the “Elephant in the room” less intimidating and will put DevOps in your grasp.

Feel free to give me your comments and suggestions.

Until then, have a great day.

Building a system of habits to achieve your goals.

Posted on | by ccadmin

Building a system of habits to achieve your goals.

Since this is the beginning of the New Year, this would be a good time to talk about new years resolutions or goals and how they tie back into IT and software development.

If you chose to be in a learning profession such as IT or Software Development, your habits will help you either get ahead and achieve your goals or just sink you. You learn a new technology stack new people skills or business skills. It would help if it were something you do without much thought, just out of habit.

What does this have to do with Programing, Management, DevOps, etc.?

The principle of “self-improvement” applies to developing a system of incremental improvement over time. If you can apply this principle to yourself, you can apply these in other areas of your life, including your work.

If you are like me you probably have given up on new year resolutions
Because they don’t work… At least not for long… Motivation just sputters out.
Even after you manage to reach your goal… You go back to doing the same stuff you resolve not to do. Instead of working on disjointed tasks, adopt a game plan for developing lasting habits that support ALL of your goals.

A game plan for developing lasting habits.

Small daily habits
1% cumulative improvements
Habit tracking

Small daily habits

Think of the habits necessary to reach your goal.
For instance to be healthy that is your goal, your strategy. Your tactics may be: eating healthy, exercise regularly.

To do those tactics, you need to create new habits such as:

Go to the gym
Learn to cook a healthy meal.

Where I would get in trouble is creating a gigantic LIST of TASKS.
Instead, start small and simple and stay small.

I will go to the gym and do one pushup once a day.
I will make rice with a rice cooker once every other day.
I will read five pages a day.

I found when I start with doing just one pushup, I end up doing more.

I start with making rice, I also end up steaming some vegetables in addition.

On reading five pages a day, after six months, I have read 900 pages or about 3 novels.

Otherwise, with a large number of “tasks” for your “habit” you end up with analysis paralysis… in other words you do nothing.

Inspiration or motivating yourself, those tricks for me don’t work well it’s too much “hit and miss.” However creating a small task habit with minimal willpower, I can make work everyday. The best stuff I’ve done has been when I didn’t even feel like doing it. I just do it out of habit.

The book Mini Habits describes how this can be done.

1% continuous improvement…

“It is not important to be better than someone else, but to be better than yesterday.”

Jigoro Kano
founder of Judo

Instead of working towards “instant discipline” or “instant insane amounts of work” or a long list of tasks that you are unable to sustain, look for small improvements instead. When you start doing things like pushups without inspiration, rather out of habit, add another habit like sit-ups or an additional routine to your workout. Find small ways to improve your habits everyday.

In management, the Kaizen approach  (otherwise known as Lean Management) is based on the belief that continuous, incremental improvement adds up to substantial change over time. This can be done in your daily habits and routine.

Find a better way to organize your workspace
Find a shortcut to work
Try a healthier food option

Little improvements in your routine will improve your life. Do this daily and compound your improvements and you have big changes in a short period of time.

Track your progress

You can use a piece of graph paper and place a check mark for each time you successfully completed your habit for the day. This acts as a way to reinforce the habit you are building.

A habit or goal tracking app also will work. There are several of them out there. I use Goal Tracker & Habit Calendar on Android.

Summary

Instead of focusing on a goal, focus on habits to reach your goals.
Focus on small daily habits that are not big.
Do 1% habits that reinforce each other and work on them every day.

Track your habit progress using a habit tracking app on your smart phone.

It will take anywhere from 20 days to 365 days. Track this until this is automatic.

Books helpful for habits

Mini Habits
Atomic Habits

I like to hear any comments or suggestions you have.
Until then, have a great year.