What is this Blog all about

There is a lot interest around DevOps.  To some degree there are a lot of similarities in the objectives and value propositions offered by Agile practices.  The major difference here is the emergence of cloud technologies providing infrastructure and platform as a service.  These capabilities have provided new tools in the toolbox to support continuous integration, test and delivery practices as well as making infrastructure as code and onDemand deployment a realistic objective. 

Companies or projects adopting these practices tend to fall into one of two camps; small innovative projects with little legacy code or capital, and large enterprise systems looking for ways to bring incremental value at the rate markets are demanding.  For the heck of it I’ll call the first set innovators and the second set optimizers. 

This Blog will be about a few random things but primarily I intend it to focus on optimizers.  We’ll take a look at challenges that face large existing systems and practices that move these systems in a direction that continue to meet changing market demands.  The ‘term teaching elephants’ to dance comes to mind and to some degree this will an exercise to see how we can teach optimizers to live in the space that innovators so easily thrive in today.  There I think will naturally be some lessons in here for innovators that are beginning to scale out. 

To me Continuous Delivery, Agile, DevOps and sustainable innovation come down to the ability to trust in your repeatable quality processes.  How can you go fast and have high quality?  You can only go fast if you always have high quality.  A second common theme is removing barriers, specifically organizational hand-offs and barriers to resources such as infrastructure.  So to start with I thought I’d take a look at some Test and Automation efforts from the not so distant path and see how they apply to DevOps.