It’s that time of year when all the Bees and the Jenkins + DevOps community are buzzing around Europe for one of the last events of the year, DevOps World | Jenkins World .
What I love about this time of year is the retrospective dialogue happening around the trends from the previous year, in addition to predicting what the future holds in 2020.
To that end, we recently caught up with Diego Lo Giudice to discuss his views on the state of software delivery and to learn about what he’ll be presenting at DevOps World | Jenkins World Lisbon.
We’re all very excited you’ll be joining us in Lisbon. What will you be talking about at DevOps World | Jenkins World this year?
Diego: My presentation focuses on elevating Agile and DevOps delivery with value stream management – unwrapping several of the key pieces of modern software delivery we see today. My goal is to provide a picture into where Forrester sees the market in terms of Agile and DevOps, and how the value stream is the next thing for organizations to tackle.
Why? So that they can focus on where value is being delivered, improve upon what they've been doing and give stakeholders more ammunition to fund more of these initiatives.
Are there any interesting data sets you plan on showcasing during this talk?
Diego: Absolutely! We’re seeing some interesting trends in the data at Forrester, based on a survey of more than 3,000 developers worldwide, and another second Agile survey that we conduct every two years that polls 150 to 200 participants.
What’s perhaps most interesting is that over the last five to six years, we haven't actually seen a growth trajectory like we once did in Agile and DevOps. If you dig deeper into the data, you'll find that the automation side of things is also starting to plateau.
Additionally, we see that organizations are failing on a broader scope, and there's not a lot of success in their digital transformations. The transformation process is happening very slowly for most, and those that are making progress aren’t seeing the positive impact they were expecting in their ability to delight existing users, gain new clients or create new services.
Would you say that transformation in large enterprises today is localized to just the Dev and Ops players at the moment?
Diego: Yes, but starting to span out to business. There's a connection between the different transformations and digital excellence. For example, what is it that makes a digital transformation successful? It’s software, and it's the way you build, deliver, deploy, test and do all that to the software. There's a need for excellence, which we haven’t fully controllered yet. Today, many are just scratching the surface in terms of the advanced practices of Agile and DevOps.
If you think about a very large bank, they have thousands of developers and they're trying to transform different areas of the organization. A transformation in a highly regulated industry like this requires a lot of business leadership and commitment from the top.
But, in general for most organizations, the CIOs and the stakeholders don't really have a good, holistic idea of what's going on, where waste is happening, where a certain practice is maybe not working, or the if the toolchain they leverage is not performing as quickly or safely as they require, and so forth.
What inhibits CIOs and other business stakeholders to have this kind of knowledge at their fingertips?
Diego: The real issue is if, and how, a CIO or even any of the stakeholders involved in the pipeline for that matter, get visibility into all this work. It is very difficult to get a good picture of how all of these different efforts of being able to build software better and faster really come together. Many business leaders today don't really have a good overview of the overall value delivery pipeline. They don't know where waste is accumulating, and furthermore, don't know where the real value is being generated and delivered.
The proposition behind value stream management is that you’re focusing the people, process and technology to be able to learn as much as possible about value streams, which are made of multiple pipelines at the enterprise level.
Therefore, a business stakeholder will want to know, "Where is my epic? How fast is it delivering? What's the state of the quality around it? Is it deployed? What's the value that it's generating?" And, you can correlate that to some of the processes to understand why some teams that are performing better than others.
It's like having a feedback loop for systems-level thinking, all the way from the planning stage to deployment and back.
Interested in learning more about value stream management? Register today for DevOps World | Jenkins World Lisbon December 3-5 and learn from Diego and other experts how value stream management and an end-to-end view of your software delivery pipeline can help!