[Reading time: 1 minute 46 seconds]
Welcome to another installment of mystery week, DevOps edition :-)
Hollywood monster trivia: what’s one way to kill vampires?
Sunlight. Nice, bright, high-visibility sunlight.
DevOps monster trivia: how do you kill hidden work, the bloodsucker of organisational effort?
Automation.
(I know, a bit anticlimactic, but hear me out).
The thing about automation is that no work can hide from it: either a particular step is included, and being executed – or it has been missed, and the whole thing falls flat.
This is one of the hidden powers of automating work: not that you get rid of manual drudgework (or ‘toil’, as some call it), but that there are no spots for work to hide in.
In an organisation just embarking on their DevOps journey, this laying open of process steps is far more powerful than the speedup and liberation that automation also brings.
For that same reason, it can also be a bit scary. Things get dragged out in the open, become visible, open to debate.
This also has the surprising side effect of slowing things down.
Instead of the nice technical task of installing (say) Jenkins, you have to debate what’s going to be automated, and exactly how.
No speedups in sight, instead you get stuck in heated discussions going precisely nowhere… at least it feels that way.
As annoying as it may feel however, it’s actually a good thing: automation is the catalyst for these debates – which should probably have been held for a long time!
Automation, after all, isn’t the cause of these conversations: it’s just the reason they are being held – and once you get finished with them, you’ll be left with a leaner organisation.
…and possibly with a different org chart.
Who could imagine CI would transform your organisation so deeply, when all you wanted was a way not to have to type make by hand anymore.