Enabling Fast Flow in Software Organizations
Summary
Resolving impediments to flow and removing unnecessary sources of cognitive load can make culture issues disappear in organisations, Nigel Kersten argued. For a long time, DevOps was useful just to make it clear that you wanted to change the traditional relationship between the teams that built software, and the teams that were responsible for maintaining and running that software, and that you wanted to implement more sophisticated automation, however Kersten says he doesn’t believe that’s the case anymore. Instead, focus on improving fast flow and low cognitive load for your teams involved in software delivery. One of the primary drivers of the early DevOps movement was a complete lack of alignment between the people who built software, and the people who were responsible for running it in production, so we all spent a lot of time focusing on ways to increase collaboration in order to improve software delivery, Kersten said. This was great, but over time collaboration itself started to become the goal, and that’s just not a productive way to run a software organisation, he added.