[Reading time: 2 minutes 33 seconds]
Among climbers, there’s a thing called Crux of a route.
It’s the make-or-break section of that route: the hardest part, whose conquest decides whether you send the route, or end up catching air.
As I’m creating a new workshop on DevOps for seasoned Agile practitioners, I’ve been forced to think about the shape of this thing I call DevOps.
I can see something emerging in my mind, but I can’t quite tell yet what that shape will be.
I’ve been thinking today about what might be called the dimensions of DevOps.
I see two pairs of terms:
+--------------+ +--------------+
| | | |
| Culture | <--------> | Technology |
| | | |
+--------------+ +--------------+
+--------------+ +--------------+
| | | |
| Practices | <--------> | Goals |
| | | |
+--------------+ +--------------+
It might be tempting to view these as dimensions, or axes, or dichotomies; but I think it’s not as simple as that.
Because when I tried to draw a diagram, I ended up drawing arrows between all of these words: they’re all in some way connected.
+--------------+ +--------------+
| | | |
| Culture | <--------> | Technology |
| | | |
+-------------++ ++-------------+
^ ^
^ | | ^
| +--------------+ |
v | | v
v v
+-------------++ ++-------------+
| | | |
| Practices | <--------> | Goals |
| | | |
+--------------+ +--------------+
(fancy, huh?)
I think this multitude of connections is the crux of DevOps – you can’t achieve success by nailing one of these boxes, or one of these arrows, in isolation.
The whole must make sense.
This isn’t limited to DevOps alone of course; Scrum for instance is notorious for being “Simple to understand, Difficult to master”, as the introduction to the Scrum guide says.
But DevOps is more complex, casts a wider net – consequently the difficulty is much greater: and so is the potential reward.
How does technology influence culture?
How does it influence practices?
And how do practices, in turn, influence culture?
…phew. We’re just getting started.
I think many of us sense this complexity, but haven’t yet found a good guide through it. I certainly haven’t. There are lots of great books on certain boxes, or certain arrows – I can probably name a book for every single item in my drawing.
But where’s the book on the entire thing? …I’m starting to wonder if it can even be written (if you’ve found the book, please let us know).
Doesn’t matter though – if we want to climb that DevOps thing, we’ll need to master the crux. Probably falling off a few times (hopefully into carefully laid protection), but eventually we’ll master it. I’m already looking forward to my next tries.