DevOps | DevOpsNet

Connecting your azure environment to your office VPN

Posted on June 11, 2014 by jamesbetteley

Okay, before I go anywhere with this topic I should point out that:

a) This is most definitely NOT a step-by-step guide on how to configure your VPN device

b) This is basically just an overview of stuff you need to know before you start

c) I can’t think of a third thing to put here, but 2 things just doesn’t feel like enough to justify a list

Why on earth would you need to connect your azure environment to your office VPN anyway?

Actually there’s all sorts of reasons for doing this, for instance you might need your Azure hosted services to connect directly to servers/services inside your office VPN. My main reason for needing to do this was to connect my Azure VMs to my Chef server running on a VM inside the office VPN. (“Why not just move your Chef server to Azure as well?!” I hear you ask. Well, let’s just imagine there was a really good reason for this, and move on).

Setting up a VPN connection can be a bit of a pain (and take ages to implement) with some datacentre providers, but with Azure it’s actually rather quite easy. The first thing you need to determine is the type of VPN connection you want to set up. Your 2 main options are point-to-site and site-to-site.

Point-to-Site essentially just involves setting up a virtual network within Azure and connecting out to it from individually configured clients within your office (if you ever work from home and VPN into the office network then you’ll be very familiar with this type of setup).

Site-to-Site involves connecting an existing office VPN to a virtual network within Azure (it’s basically the equivalent of adding your Azure subscription to your local office network).

I opted for a site-to-site connection because it scales well, and once it’s set up there’s no need to use VPN clients on my on-premise servers.

If you want to setup a site-to-site VPN connection to Azure you’ve basically got 2 choices:

Setup a connection between your existing VPN hardware (you can find a list of supported VPN devices here) and an Azure Virtual Network
Setup a connection between an Azure Virtual Network and a local Windows 2012 R2 server with Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS).

Setting up a connection using your existing VPN hardware

Many organisations will have dedicated VPN devices, but as mentioned previously not all of these are suitable for connecting a site-to-site VPN to Azure. If your device does happen to be supported then you’ll need to get hands-on with the device configuration in order to setup the site-to-site connection. This will differ from one device to the next, so good luck with that!

Whatever supported device you’re using, you’ll still need to create and configure a virtual network in Azure. The full instructions on how to do this can be found here, but here’s a basic checklist of the sort of stuff you’ll need to know:

Your DNS Servers
Your local network name (obvs)
Your VPN device’s IP address
Your address space
Subnet details (if you want to create one)
Affinity group name (you can create one as you go through the Virtual Network setup)

Other than creating the virtual network, you just need to create a gateway within that virtual network. Details of how to do that can be found here. This stuff is all really simple from within the Azure Management UI.

And that’s about it from the Azure side. You now just need to configure your office VPN device. As mentioned earlier, the details of how to do this will depend on what device you have, so time to dig out your VPN device’s user manual!

But what if your VPN device isn’t on “The List”??

Well, fear not, for there is another way! All you need is a Windows 2012 Server with RRAS configured.

NOTE: I know you can also configure RRAS on Windows server 2008 R2 but I don’t yet know if this will work (we’re still trying to test it out as I’m writing this). Here, try this guide if you fancy giving it a shot, and let me know if it works with Azure!

One thing to note is that the Microsoft documentation pretty much says this setup won’t work if your RRAS server is behind a NAT or a firewall, but this isn’t actually the case. It’ll work just as long as your RRAS server has a public IP address.

So, here’s a basic overview of what you’ll need:

The same shizzle as previously for the Azure Virtual Network
A Windows server 2012 with 2 NICS
A public IP address on the 2012 server
A local Gateway server (you could just use the RRAS machine for this though)
ICMPv4 enabled on your firewall

So there we are, nothing too complicated at all. There’s plenty of configuration work to be done in setting all this stuff up, but the Azure side is definitely the easy part. As for the RRAS stuff, don’t install and configure this manually – you actually need to edit a powershell script with the details you get along the way, and then run the script. It sounds like a ball-ache, but it’s actually more fun than the usual Windows service installation! There are plenty of good resources for helping you work through a site-to-site setup in a step-by-step guide, such as:

SAFe – Command and Control Agile?

Posted on September 16, 2013 by jamesbetteley

SAFe (the Scaled Agile Framework, with a random “e” at the end) seems to be the talk of the agile world at the moment, and as you’d expect, opinions are both strong and divided. On the one side you’ve got the likes of Ken Schwaber and David Anderson (the guys who brought us Scrum and Kanban respectively), while on the other side you’ve got, well, pretty much anyone who stands to make any money out of SAFe.

I’m working at a company in London who might be about to go down the SAFe route, so obviously I’ve had to do a bit of research into this new framework, as it could soon be directly impacting me in my capacity as an agile coach and devops ninja.

My initial questions were:

What the hell is this and how come I’ve never heard of it?
Why is there no mention of devops?
Is it really as prescriptive as it sounds?
Isn’t it a bit “anti-agile”? (recall “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, part of the agile manifesto)

So I started looking into SAFe. There’s quite a bit of information on the SAFe website, and the “Big Picture” on the homepage is crammed with information, jargon and stuff. At first glance it seemed fairly sensible on the higher levels, but overly prescriptive on the team level. Then you start clicking on icons, and that’s when it gets interesting…

Story Sizing, Velocity and Estimating: They tell us that all teams should have the same velocity and the same sizing (i.e. 1 point in team A should be exactly the same as 1 point in team B). They also say that 1 point should equal 1 day. I find this quite interesting, as this time-based evaluation is flawed for a number of reasons. Velocity (in normal scrum) should be obtained by measurement, not by simply saying “right, there’s 5 people in the team, 5×8=40, therefore our velocity will be 40!” This pains me, because I firmly believe that each team should be allowed to work out their own sustainable velocity, based on observation and results (and applying the Deming cycle of making a change and seeing if it improves output). If we are all given a goal of x points to achieve in a sprint, all we will do as a team is fiddle our estimations so that we hit that target. That’s exactly why we don’t use velocity as a target. What am I missing here?

ScrumXP: SAFe seems to suggest that you MUST do 2 week sprints. You have no option in this. Doesn’t seem to matter if you want to have a kanban system based around a weekly release schedule. SAFe seems largely ignorant of this. Is SAFe suggesting that Kanban doesn’t work? Has anyone told David Anderson?

SAFe prescribes Hardening Sprints: These are sprints set aside at the end of every release (one every 5th Sprint), to allow you to do such things as User Acceptance Testing and Performance Testing. In Continuous Delivery we work towards making these activities happen as early as possible in the release pipeline, in order to shorten the feedback loop. We really don’t want to be finding out that our product isn’t performant a day before we expect to release it! I certainly wouldn’t encourage the use of hardening sprints in the SAFe way, instead I would encourage people to build these activities into their pipelines as early as possible. I think of hardening Sprints as a bad smell, isn’t it just a way of confessing that you don’t expect to catch certain things until the end? So rather than try to fix that situation and reduce that feedback loop, you’re kind of just saying “hey, s**t happens, we’ll catch it in the hardening sprint”.

Innovation Sprints: These happen at the same time as the hardening sprint. SAFe is suggesting that during a normal sprint we don’t have time for innovation. And that is quite often the case – but wouldn’t it be better if we actually did have sufficient time for continuous innovation, rather than actually have a dedicated half-sprint for innovation? The book “Slack” by Tom DeMarco talks about the myth of total efficiency, and suggests that by slowing down and building in some slack time, we get greater returns. This is better achieved as part of everyday practice rather than working at some mythical “total efficiency” level and then having an “innovation sprint”. The SAFe approach seems to be an easy option. Rather than taking the time to determine a team’s sustainable velocity which includes sufficient time for innovation, it suggests just saving it up for a sprint at the end of every release. Don’t forget that at the same point, the team will apparently be doing “hardening” activities, gearing up for a release, and planning the next one. For some reason I feel uncomfortable with the idea that innovation is something that should be scheduled once every 10 weeks, rather than something that should be encouraged and nurtured as part of normal practice.

The Scrum Master: SAFe has this to say about the Scrum Master:

In SAFe, we assume that the Scrum Master is also a developer, tester, project manager or other skilled individual (though not the team’s manager) who fulfills his Scrum Master role on a part time basis.

Wow, that’s some assumption. They seem to suggest that you can just take any developer, tester etc and send them on a scrum course, and hey presto, you have a scrum master. And yes, you could do this, but what sort of scrum master are you getting? They also say:

responsibilities can generally be accomplished in about 25% of the time for that team member

which I again find surprising. A Scrum Master is just one quarter of a person’s time?? Seriously? Mentoring a team, coaching individuals, removing impediments, applying the principles of Scrum, helping the team work towards a goal, leading a team towards continuous improvement – all of these things are expected of the Scrum Master in SAFe, and yet they can all be achieved in “about 25%” of a person’s time, apparently. And where does an agile coach come into this? Well, they don’t exist in SAFe. In SAFe you have SAFe consultants instead.

The Product Manager and The product Owner: These are 2 very separate, very different roles in SAFe. A Product Owner works with the Scrum Team, but doesn’t have contact with the customer. The Product Manager has contact with the customer but deals with the scrum team through the Product Owner. Also the product owner doesn’t own the product vision – that responsibility belongs to the product manager – this seems strange to me, I would have naturally thought that the product “owner” would own the product vision. So essentially we’re adding yet another link in the chain between the customer and the team. I’m struggling to see this as a good thing, when in my experience a close relationship between the business and the team has always been of great benefit.

There is no Business Analyst role in SAFe, which I find quite interesting. This role seems to have been split out into the Product Owner and Product manager roles. For instance, the PO is meant to do the Just-In-Time analysis on the backlog stories.

in SAFe, the UX Designer is NOT part of the agile team. Rather, they work “at the Program Level” (whatever the hell that means, possibly on a different floor, maybe) yet they still do the following:

Provide Agile Teams with the next increment of UI design, UX guidelines, and design elements in a just-in-time fashion
Attend sprint planning, backlog grooming, iteration demos
Work in an extremely incremental way
Rely on fast and frequent feedback via rapid code implementation
Are highly collaborative, and…
The UI criteria are included in the “Definition of Done” and User Story acceptance criteria

But I must remind you that according to SAFe they are NOT part of the agile team 🙂 Is it just me or does this come across as a bit, I don’t know, pedantic?

Pretty much the same rule applies to devops (which was included in a later version of SAFe) – devops people aren’t in the team BUT, you can simply achieve “devops” in part by:

integrating personnel from the operations team with the Agile teams

Er, ok. So they’re not part of the team but they’re integrated with the team. Riiiiight. On a plus note – it does mention “designing for deployability”, which can never be overstated in my opinion.

These are just my initial observations and I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say on the subject as we embark on our SAFe journey. I’m hoping it’s not as prescriptive as it sounds, as I honestly don’t believe there’s a one-size-fits-all solution to adopting Agile. I very much believe that every organisation needs to go on their own journey with agile, and find out what works best for them. It’s my opinion that the lessons you learn on this journey are more important than the end result. In my experience, most organisations will have invariably witnessed a fantastic cultural shift during their gradual transition to agile, and I find it very difficult to see how a prescribed framework such as SAFe can facilitate this cultural shift.

The Agile Silver Bullet

So is SAFe really an agile silver bullet? I doubt it, but time will tell. I certainly don’t disagree with the majority of the contents of the “Big Picture” but where I do disagree, I feel very concerned, as I seem to disagree on a very fundamental level.

I would be much happier if SAFe was a lot less prescriptive-sounding. I can see SAFe being popular with larger-scale organisations with a penchant for job-titles and an unhealthy affinity for bureaucracy, I mean, it’s a framework, and they lap that stuff up! I can also see it being quite effective in those situations, after all, pretty much anything’s better than Waterfall!

I can see SAFe appealing to people who aren’t prepared to go on the agile journey, because they fear it. They fear they will fail, and they fear a lack of clarity. This framework puts nice titles everywhere, tickboxes to be ticked and nice clear processes to blindly follow. I can imagine it would be hard not to look like you’re making progress! I don’t yet trust the framework, but that could still change, but for the time being I’ve got the impression that it’s command-and-control agile, more of a tick-box exercise than a vessel for personal and organisational development.

What is DevOps, and Other Fluffy Questions

Posted on April 10, 2013 by jamesbetteley

If Devopsdays London was an office party, Patrick Dubois would be the Head of HR keeping an eye on proceedings, the guest speakers would be the live entertainment, and the Zero Turnaround guys would lacing the punch with more vodka and photocopying their body parts.

Zero Turnaround bought the fun, as evidenced by their stand which looked more like a booze section from an off licence, and this video here, which had me giggling in the back row like a naughty school kid:

Watch out Grammy Awards. Naturally, I felt I had to go and have a chat with these guys during one of the breaks and find out if I could blag any of their free booze…

“It’s all been taken, by competition winners” explained Simon from behind a massive heap of Guinness and Irish Whiskey. “We’re just, er, looking after this lot” said Neeme (Simon’s Zero Turnaround partner in crime) Yeah, sure.

No luck with the free booze, I thought maybe I could distract them with a question or two about devops, and then pinch some beer while they were deep in thought.

“So what does DevOps mean to you guys?” I asked, with half an eye on a bottle of Jamesons…

“A lot of it is about streamlining and bringing value to the customers sooner” Said Simon Maple, Tech Evangelist at ZT. And I suppose that’s actually what it’s ultimately about. Bridging the Dev and Ops gap is really about making us work as a team more smoothly, which leads to us being able to get stuff to our customers more quickly and more reliably. “But of course you need to right tools to do it – you have to automate across Dev and Ops” He added “This helps us remove bottlenecks”, which reminded me about my bottle of whiskey objective, so I asked another question by means of a diversion…

“Do you see a big crossover between DevOps and Agile” I asked. “Yes, DevOps is sort of like Agile breaking out of Dev and into Ops, but you can do devops stuff without being Agile” which again is true, but I imagine if you’re truly agile as a business, you’re almost certainly going to be doing “devops”.

Job Title: DevOps Engineer

Next, I decided to chuck in a question that caused a whole heap of opinionated discussion at devopsdays, namely “Is DevOps a job title?” (correct answer of course is – “what does it matter what your job title is? You can call yourself the Prince of Darkness for all I care. What matters is getting stuff done”), but Simon went for “I don’t think so, is Agile a job title?” which also made a lot of sense.

“So” I asked, “what do you see as the main challenges to DevOps?” I thought this questions was sufficiently fluffy to warrant an equally fluffy response, during which I could maybe accidentally knock one of the cans of Guinness into my bag…

“Well DevOps has well and truly gone viral now, so our main challenge is to make sure we do it right, or it’ll get a bad name” said Simon, as if he’d heard that particular question a million times before. No luck with the Guinness there then.

After about 5 minutes of chatting I was no closer to bagging myself any free beer than I was when I turned up, but I was having a good chat, and eventually we got around to talking about their products, JRebel and (the one I was more interested in) Live Rebel. I’d already seen their demo and it looked pretty cool to me. I’ll trial JRebel soon and put a review up here too, as I think people will be pretty impressed (I know I was), but that’s for another time. If you want to know more about their products, go see their website, duuh! For those too lazy to go to google and type in “Zero Turnaround”, here’s their website: http://zeroturnaround.com

For those even lazier than that, here’s a REALLY brief summary:

Live Rebel is a deployment orchestrator. It rolls up code and db changes into a release package and automates the delivery to whatever environment you like. It supports Java, Ruby, Python, PHP and Perl (officially) and Neeme also says it’ll work with .Net as well (not so officially). It also plugs nicely into most decent CI systems, such as Jenkins/Hudson and Bamboo (for which there are plugins) and has a one-stop management console for managing your servers and environments etc and so forth.

Anyway, I still had one final question for Simon and Neeme… “What has been your highlight of devopsdays then guys?” I asked. “Meeting the real creme de la creme of the industry and just being part of a great conference” came the reply. So, not meeting me then. Thanks guys. 😦

Simon Maple is @sjmaple on twitter and Neeme is @nemecec. Follow them at your own peril.

Team Transformation for Continuous Delivery with Chris O’Dell – as it happened

Posted on March 19, 2013 by jamesbetteley

By James Betteley

Preamble:

No time for that, I’m seriously late. I was leaving the office just as someone said “James, before you go…” and that was the end of any hopes I had of getting here on time.

It’s 6:40pm, I’ve finally got my sh1t together, and we’re off! In act that’s a lie, they were off ages ago. I’m so late there aren’t even any seats, so I’m sat in the corner at the back, like a proper Billy No-mates

6:41pm: Chris is talking about big balls of mud and how they’ve gone from that, to a much smaller ball (no mention of mud this time).

6:42: Slides are going by quicker than I can type! Chris is talking about the importance of moving away from a “blame culture”. I personally hate blame culture, I think it was the French who invented it. Arf! (sorry).

6:45pm: Ok, there’s a slide on how to get to Continuous Delivery, I’m going to pay attention to this one…

It says you need:

Cross functional product focused teams
A focus on technical debt
Sit the team close to their clients
actively remove blame culture
focus on self improvement
radiate metrics
collect metrics on work in progress

After a quick coffee break it’s time to interrogate the suspects – It’s Q&A time!

7:01pm: How do you share “commonality of functionality”? Asks someone who likes words ending in “ality”. Service oriented architecture was apparently a big help responds someone from the 7digital posse (they are a posse by the way Chris has been joined by some 7digital reinforcements).

7.02pm: The next question is about metrics and how they collect them. Apparently they’re working on a logging system, but I’m guessing they also use CI and some live reporting tools which I probably missed in the earlier slides! Oops.

7.05pm: “What didn’t work?” Asks someone (my favorite question so far. I’m giving it a 7.5 out of ten). Trying to patch things up didn’t work. The dependency chain caused a pain. Acceptance Tests were a pain (haha!) Using UI stuff and a shared DB caused Acceptance Test issues, they say. I nod in agreement.

7:07pm: Someone says something about keeping environments the same being a challenge. They’re meant to be the same??? Where’s the fun in that?

7.10pm: A question on blame culture is next up, namely “How do you get rid of it?” By not telling on people! Also, having a dev manager who protects from above is handy.

It’s how you respond [to blame] that’s important, as that’s what sets the tone.

7:11pm: How did you make the culture change? Asks someone who wants to know how they made the culture change. It’s another good question, and one I’d really like to learn from. It’s all very well having a great culture, and there’s no denying its importance, but how do you make a culture change if it’s not ideal to start with? Sadly the answer isn’t straightforward. The posse reply with things like “Adopt Agile principles”, “tech manifesto” (which sounds cool), “self-organising teams”, “small steps” and “leading by example”. Followed up with “hire well”, “you need champions!” “do workshops”. Also, “the CTO is pretty cool”. Hmmmm, so no “click here to change your culture” button then?

7:16pm: The next question is a corker. It went a bit like: “Usually have to change architecture of system to support Continuous Delivery, but also sometimes the architecture of organisation as well. Did this happen?” That’s the winner so far. “No” comes the answer. Damn. At 7 digital there’s a focus on lack of hierarchy, so quite a flat structure. Not much change was needed then, obviously. I think the word “culture” came up as well, and not for the first time.

7:18pm: How have they managed to integrate Ops, asks the next person, clearly fresh from devopsdays. “We’re still learning” is the honest sounding response. Not that the all haven’t been honest sounding. They’ve started assigning Ops people to “the team”, by which I assume they mean the project team.

7:20pm: Someone wants to know if they had a shared goal between tech/ops and dev? I think the answer is yes. Basically Rob (who is the head of both ops and dev) became head of both ops and dev, which helped. He also created a tech manifesto and is toying with the idea of putting up some posters. When I was a kid I had a poster of Airwolf in my bedroom. Not sure if that’s going to help anyone though.

7:21pm: “Is there a QA on the team?” is the next question. Yarp (I’m paraphrasing). But the QA person is more of a coach – everyone is expected to do it, but they’re there to lead. No separate dev manger or QA manager – everyone’s one great big team (aaahhhh).

7:23pm: Somebody has asked how they handle support, and whether there’s a support team. I think the person who responds says there’s a “Systems team”, who get a text or call in the middle of the night. It seems a bit cruel that they wait until the middle of the night to text them but what do I know? Apparently the devs may also get involved, so that’s ok. There’s an on-call team, “but this is an area for improvement” they confess. Mainly it’s a case of “call someone!”, which I personally think is pretty good. But they do stress how there’s a focus on monitoring so that they can catch as many issues as possible before they become, er, issues, if you catch my drift. They said it much better than I can write it.

7:26pm: “How frequently did you deploy your big ball of mud compared to how frequently you do it now?” And that question goes to contestant number 2. It used to be one every 3 months, but they don’t measure how frequently they can deploy stuff any more because it’s that frequent.
(that’s just showing off). Improving the deploy mechanism was all-important. And changing the culture to shift to more frequent releases. That word “culture” again.

7:30pm: This question sounds like a plant: “How do you have time to test stuff if you deploy so often?” asks some cheeky 7digital employee hidden in the audience. I’m joking of course, it’s a nice question because it leads to a well executed answer: Chris basically explains that because they deploy so often, their releases are very small. Also, they’ve automated the hell out of everything.

7:31pm: Dave asks a really good question but I’m far too slow to keep up! It included the phrase “separation of concerns” so was probably too complicated for me to understand anyway.

7:40pm: There’s a question about schema changes. I reckon the answer will include the word “culture”. it does. Somehow.

If there was a word cloud for this Q&A session then “culture” would dwarf all the others. Something tells me that “culture shift” is important.

7:45pm: “How do you manage project accounting?” “We don’t” – No mention of culture!

7:46pm: Someone asks “If there’s a production issue, like an outage, who takes ownership?”. Nice one, who indeed does take ownership? “Everyone, we have a culture of shared ownership”. Gah! it’s all about culture!

7:47pm: “How do you decide what projects get green lighted?” asks some poor innocent from the back of the room (and no, it wasn’t me). Apparently this has nothing to do with Continuous Delivery (and all the other questions have?) and there’s nobody from the product team here so that question lands on stony ground.

7:52pm: Banos treads a fine line by asking a question dangerously close to the time when we’re meant to be heading to the pub, but just about gets away with it “what CI system do you use?” he asks, and the answer is (drum roll…..) Team City! Actually there was no drum roll, I made that up. Then interestingly they say that everyone is in charge of looking after Team city and that they just trust each other! Crazyness!

8.02pm: “I was told we finish at 8” says Chris, and she’s bloody well right, there’s a pub nearby and some of us are thirsty.

So, in conclusion, 7digital know their Continuous Delivery from their TDD, and “culture” is the word of the evening. I’m off for beer with Banos, and the rest of the London Continuous Delivery gang!

Keep an eye out for #londoncd on twitter for news of the next London Continuous Delivery meetup, or go to the London CD website. Also follow the likes of @matthewpskelton, @AgileSteveSmith, @banoss and @davenolan for more Continuous Delivery goodness.

Adopting Agile in 3 “Easy” Steps

Posted on March 18, 2013 by jamesbetteley

All good plans come in 3 phases:

Although I won’t be collecting any underpants, I’ll be following this basic template (with a couple of tweaks here and there) during an Agile adoption initiative I’m currently working on.

In the South Park episode (from which I have taken the picture above) the boys discover a bunch of underpant-stealing gnomes, who are collecting underpants as part of a grand plan to make profit. The gnomes claim to be business experts but none of them appears to know what phase 2 of the plan is. All they know is that their business model is based on collecting underpants, and so that’s what they’ll do.

Unfortunately, I have been witness to a couple of attempts at adopting agile which weren’t very dissimilar to the underpants gnomes’ business plan. Namely, a business starts “Adopting Agile”, usually driven by the development team, where they start doing stand-ups and using a sprint board (this is phase 1) and somehow they are surprised when this doesn’t suddenly start producing profit. Clearly, “becoming Agile” isn’t as simple as that.

Phase 1 – Collect business reasons (not underpants)

So you’re going Agile. Presumably you’ve determined that this is what you want, and what your customers need. If you haven’t done this yet then stop right there and ask yourself “Do I Need Go Agile?”. The answer might be “no”, but does needing to go Agile have to be the only reason? Maybe you just want to go agile to see what the fuss is all about, or to make your business more attractive to potential new employees.

So lets assume we’re going agile, and you have valid business reasons to do so. My first suggestion would be to make those business reasons highly visible. You have to outline the existing issues and how Agile can help to fix them. Mitchell and Webb once did a sketch about a toothbrush company who had to try to think of some gimmick to add to their toothbrushes in order to keep increasing their sales. They came up with the idea of “dirty tongue”. This is where microscopic “tonguanoids” build up, and basically result in social exclusion and a lack of sex. Their solution: to put bristles on the other side of the toothbrush so that people can brush their tongues while they brush their teeth. People will buy these toothbrushes despite the fact that “brushing your tongue makes you retch, everybody knows that”. The point I’m making, very badly, is that it’s a lot easier to sell things if people think that what they’re buying into will fix some very real, tangible issue.

The same goes with Agile. To get the buy-in you need to make your agile adoption a success, you’ll need to identify how “going Agile” is going to make life better for everyone concerned.

If the problem you’ve got is that you never ship software on time, or you constantly fail to deliver what the customer wants, then it’s fairly easy to “sell” agile as the solution. The concept of sprints are a doddle for everyone to understand, and they’ll love the idea that the customer will have regular interactions with the development team, and get to see regular progress in the demos. “Of course!” they’ll say “It’s so obvious, why didn’t I think of that before”. The business should easily be able to see how short, sharp sprints with an emphasis on “working software” will make it easier to deliver what the customer wants, and manage their expectations of when it’ll be ready.

But what if those aren’t the problems you need to solve?

What if your problem is quality? How do you convince the business that Agile will result in a higher quality product? It’s not quite so easy. Agile itself won’t deliver better quality, but the good practices you’ll have to implement in order to successfully be agile will help to improve your quality. I was thinking about this the other day because it’s exactly the problem I was faced with.

Agile isn’t going to make it easier to reliably test our software. But to be agile, we need to be able to build and deploy our project rapidly so that we can test it right there and then, not tomorrow, not next week, but right now, so that the testers and devs can work in tandem, building features and signing them off and moving on to the next one. We have to facilitate this in order to be agile, so as a byproduct of going agile we might have to invest in creating a new build and deployment system. And it has to be quick so it’ll have to be automated.

So we have an automated build and deployment system, but to be able to reliably test our features we’ll have to make sure the environments are reliable. We can throw people at this problem and dedicate a team to making sure our environments are clean and regularly audited, or we can automate all that as well! Fortunately there are numerous tools and good practices we can follow to do this, just take a look at Chef, Puppet, Vagrant, and VMWare as examples of tools for automating deployments of virtual machines, and the concepts of “infrastructure as code” for good practices. (of course, if your hardware isn’t already virtualised the first thing to do is see whether it can be, and if it really, honestly can’t, then look at tools like Norton Ghost and Powershell for ways of automating as much as you can).

“Agile” and “Improved Quality” might not be the most obvious bed partners, but the journey to becoming agile almost forces you to take steps which will naturally go towards improving your quality.

Hopefully you’ll have enough “sales material” to put forward a great case for agile – you can deliver exactly what the customer wants, to a higher quality, and you can manage their expectations in a way you could never do before. And that’s just scratching the surface of what Agile can do for a business, but for the purposes of keeping this post to a reasonable length, I’ll leave it at those 3 things!

Phase 2 – Pick the most appropriate project, and start doing Scrum

The sales pitch is over and now it’s time to start doing stuff. Make your life a lot easier by picking a project that has as many of the following features as possible:

Smart developers and testers
Isn’t suffering from a tonne of technical debt
Has users who are happy to get involved in early & regular feedback
Is small, new or yet to begin

If you’re taking on an existing project, a good idea at this point is to benchmark your existing processes. Consider trying to measure the following:

How long does it take to get a single change from request through to production deployment?
How much time and money does it cost to fix an issue on production?
How many bugs do you typically find on your production code every month?
How often do you deliver features that don’t satisfy the customer?
How often do you deliver features after the deadline?

Measuring some of the things above is clearly non-trivial, but if you can find these stats somewhere, they’ll be very useful benchmarks for you in the future. When you can demonstrate that all of these metrics are improved in your new Agile process, god-like status will soon follow.

You - after delivering "agile" to the business

Guess who just delivered a release on time…
Ohhhh Yeeeeaaaaahhhh!

I recommend doing Scrum because it’s simple and has the most support in terms of people with experience, material (books, courses etc), and tools. It’s a good “framework” to get you started, and once you’ve had success, you can evolve into other methods, or incorporate them into Scrum (such as BDD, TDD etc).

Here’s one of many great books to get you started on your agile journey

At about this point you’ll need to do some ~~brainwashing~~ training. The concept of doing analysis, design, development and testing all at the same time is going to sound absolutely bonkers to some people. Try your best to explain it to them, but don’t waste too much time on this – just crack on and make a start!

Most people will enjoy the experience of working in this “new” way, and the first few sprints will probably benefit from the fact that everyone is performing better simply because they feel more invigorated. Use this opportunity to promote scrum across the organisation.

In this phase, always maintain a focus on “the business” and not just on the technical team. It’s important that the business feels part of this new process or they’ll just see it as some crazy dev thing which doesn’t really affect them, and they won’t try to understand it. Business people might refer to this as “Promoting Synergy”, which I’ve just shoe-horned into this post so that I can add a picture from Lonely Island’s “Like A Boss” video. However, I do like to make a point of always highlighting the extra business value we’re delivering, and make sure the Product Managers (soon to be “Product Owners”) are involved all the way. They represent the traditional link between the customers and what we’re delivering, and so it’s essential that they understand the benefits of agile.

Promote Synergy!

I was recently asked about the impact of “going agile” on a project’s release schedule, and when we would be able to deliver the features we’ve promised to the customers. It’s difficult to explain that we no longer know when we’ll deliver stuff, but at some point, people will have to realise that this is the wrong question. I prefer the idea of a rolling roadmap, which is continually reviewed and updated (as often as you can afford to do it, really). Rolling Roadmaps give the business, as well as the customers a good idea of our intentions, but it is very different to fixed dates on a release schedule, or a traditional yearly roadmap. Of course, everyone needs to understand that the main driver for our deliverables will be the customers, and what the customer wants will usually change over a shorter period than you expect. So for your new “Agile” project, try to work towards implementing a rolling roadmap culture, and move away from long-term fixed delivery dates (if you can).

One final note on Phase 2: Make it fun, and make it different.

Phase 3 – Improve

Agile promotes “fast feedback loops” all over the place: in development we get fast feedback on our code through Continuous Integration, with BDD we get fast feedback to the Product Owners/BAs and of course with our more frequent releases we get faster feedback from the customers. And so it is with our Agile processes as a whole. With short sprints and the clever use of retrospectives we can continually tinker with our fine tuning to see if we can improve our quality and velocity. Look at areas you can try to improve, change something and then see if your change has had a positive impact at the end of the sprint. This is basically the concept behind Deming’s Shewhart Cycle:

Deming actually preferred “Plan, Do, Study, Act”, whereas I myself prefer “Plan, Do, Measure, Act”. The reason I prefer this is because it implies the use of quantifiable metrics to base our actions on, rather than some other non-quantifiable observations. Anyways, the point is that after agile is applied, you should keep looking at ways to continuously improve. This is key to keeping everyone feeling fresh and invigorated, helps us to learn from our mistakes, and encourages innovation.

So there you go, Agile delivered in 3 well easy steps. It shouldn’t take you much longer than an afternoon. Ok, it might take a bit longer but if you’re looking for a 30,000 foot overview of a simple 3-phase approach, then you could do a lot worse than apply the principles of “Sell the Agile Idea, Pick the Best Project, and Keep Improving”.

A Sprint Retrospective

Posted on February 18, 2013 by jamesbetteley

The IT Ops team’s 4th sprint came to its conclusion recently… and we delivered all of our commitments! Huzzah! This post is basically a summary of how we analysed the sprint and what we got up to in the retrospective.
The main objectives of this sprint were:

Rolling out a new password policy
Rolling out a new file server
Rebuilding the dev db

In addition to these tasks there were a bunch of other smaller tasks, far too dull for me to list here.

This was the first time we’d completed all of our committed points, and it gave us enough information to work out how many points we can realistically attempt to deliver in each sprint.
Once again the team completed over 100 points in the sprint, and once again we committed to doing 50 project points (the other 50-or-so being unplanned interruptions).

Sprint 4 in Numbers:

We completed 50 committed points
We completed 64 unplanned points
Total: 114 points
That’s very much in-line with the total we’ve come to expect.
We averaged 3.8 points per person per day for the duration of the sprint.

This means that we’re able to do roughly 2 points per person per day on committed project work.
In an ideal scenario, with no interruptions, no meetings and nothing to distract us from our tasks, we estimate that we could do about 6 points per person per day.
Therefore, statistically speaking, were actually 33% productive on our project work.
Of the remaining 67% we spent another 33% on interruptions.

So what happens to the other 33%??
The remaining effort and time is taken up with meetings, discussions, unrecorded interruptions, emails, phone calls and unproductive time. This figure (33%) is in the region of what I expected before we embarked upon this process some 8 weeks ago.

How to use this information
Well we know that we can complete approximately 50 project points per sprint. So we can now break down upcoming projects into tasks, and give realistic predictions on when they can be delivered.
The only caveat is that we do not make guarantees on project priority. We will always commit to working on delivering the highest business value projects first, and as a result will take guidance from the business on priorities. If a project’s priority is lowered then it will likely drop down the pecking order of our tasks, and its delivery date will slip.
In short, providing project priorities don’t chance for the duration of the project, we can now give far more realistic predictions on delivery dates.

Retrospective
To get the creative juices flowing, we started the retrospective with everyone drawing a picture of Sprint 4. There were no rules to this task, we could draw anything we wanted that represented sprint 4 for us as individuals.

Here’s the resulting “artwork”, if you can call it that:

Farid, who for some reason I expected to be something of an artist, drew a picture of the Jules Rimet trophy. This was partly to represent the fact that we completed the Password and File server projects, and partly to reflect that we hit our target.

Nick’s “effort” was of a question mark going into a grinder with a gold bar coming out of the other end. This reflects the fact that we’re not 100% sure of what’s happening up front at the beginning of our sprint, and we base our estimations on “best-guesses”, but by the end of the sprint we were producing the goods. It also raises a very relevant point about how we know we are addressing the right projects/tasks in the right order. More on that later.

Jon (in his unique avant-garde style) drew a person wearing a Boss hat. The person represents the team, and the boss hat is representative of the fact that we all completed our tasks on time and delivered what we committed to. Or at least that was his explanation, although I suspect it has more to do with the Lonely Island “Like a Boss” video, which is something of a theme tune in the IT Ops team. Seriously.

Leo drew the burndown, the original of which you can find at the bottom of this post.

Next up, we all chose 1 thing from the sprint that we wanted to discuss in more detail. Here’s what we ended up speaking about:
1. Using small post-it notes to record interruptions on the board didn’t work. They’re too small and not sticky enough. This was a major issue for Leo and Jon, who clearly have something against post-it notes.
2. We need to plan more carefully. Our planning sessions are rushed, and as a result we don’t think our tasks through as well as we should. The main failure here is that we don’t think about the impact other people can have on our tasks.

Following this, we discussed what we think went well, and what we think went badly in the sprint:

WENT WELL

Better prioritisation of interruptions allowed us to concentrate on the
committed tasks
Implementing the password policy
Realistic goal setting

WENT BADLY

IT request backlog grew bigger

What did we learn from Sprint 4:

50 Project points is our magic number
Don’t over-commit
Do more forward planning
Our prioritizing is getting better

Finally we discussed the stats and figures mentioned earlier, and then we looked back at the burndown to see if there was any useful information we could take from it.
Leo suggested that the burndown be pre-populated with the mean line, so that we can see our daily deviation from that line. I have filed this suggestion in a folder named “Leo’s Good Ideas”, and we’ll adopt it in future sprints once I’ve worked out how to use Excel properly (or found a pen and a ruler).

The Burndown

Improvements
As mentioned earlier, we’ve worked out what our average velocity is – and we can now confidently say that 50 project points per sprint is a realistic target for the team. Now that we’ve established this, we need to turn our attention to ensuring that we’re delivering the highest business value we possibly can. At present we feel we are slightly deficient in engaging with the business to define our priorities, so in the future we’ll be looking at having a much closer engagement with the rest of the business to help us with our prioritising and acceptance criteria. We want to be delivering the most important projects first, and we want to have a clear picture of what a successful delivery of those projects looks like.
Over the next couple of sprints we’ll be shifting our focus in this direction, and hopefully people will start to see the results over the next few weeks.

P.S. Jon is available for hire as a short order artist, ideal for weddings and birthday parties. Disappointment guaranteed.

ITOps Sprint 1 Review

Posted on December 19, 2012 by jamesbetteley

Our first ever ITOps sprint completed on Friday 7^th December amid much fanfare and celebration (ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration). The team completed a whopping grand total of 103 points. Among the highlights were:

An Anti-Virus upgrade
A new dev server
10+ IT Requests from the backlog

Yes, those were the highlights. But don’t scoff – that new dev server was AMAZEBALLS.

Retrospective

The format of our first retrospective was to spend 5 minutes writing down (on cards) what we felt went well in our first sprint, and what went not-so-well. We then discussed these and made a list of “lessons learned”. It turned out a bit like this:

What went well	What went not-so-well
2 week “focus” made a huge difference: we could concentrate on a smaller number of tasks, rather than work from a massive backlog with no end in sight.	We under-estimated task sizes. Massively, in some cases.
Having the tasks on the board helped us see what everyone was doing	7 point task sizes were waaaaaaaaaaay too large
When working on a task, we no longer felt that we perhaps ought to be working on something else	We did fewer IT requests than we would otherwise have done
Time-boxing certain IT requests was a good idea.	We didn’t take holidays into account when we did our sprint planning! Duuuuuh.
Improved visibility: the rest of the world could see that we didn’t actually spend 2 weeks updating Facebook	We failed to get much done on the new File Server
We got through more project work than we expected
Easy to visualise the sheer amount of unplanned interruptions
We prioritised our interruptions quite well

Lessons Learned

2 week sprints work well for the team’s focus
We should time-box research into upcoming projects
Any task which is above 5 points should be broken down into smaller tasks
We need to improve our estimation
We need to focus on completing the projects if we’ve committed to them
We need to take holidays into account!
Relative to interruptions, we can do more project work than we originally expected

Facts and Figures

We completed 103 points
53 points of which were project points
50 points were interruptions
15 points were in progress at the end of the sprint
9 points (of committed work) remained incomplete
4.5 points were blocked

The Burndown

Friday to Tuesday were the least productive days in terms of project work. This was mainly due to ~~hangovers~~ holidays which “we” (namely me) hadn’t taken into account, with 2/3rds of the team being off at one point.

Conclusion

Sprint 1 was an enjoyable success within the team. The increased visibility of interruptions as well as a clearer focus on our tasks was refreshing.

We failed to deliver one project (the new file server), which is disappointing, and we will need to focus on progressing and completing our project tasks in future.

We’ll continue with Scrum for the time being.

The other thing we noticed was that interruptions take up more time than just the duration of the interruption. There’s an additional amount of time on top of each interruption which needs to be taken into account. When someone is being productive working on a project task which, let’s say will take 3 hours, and they get interrupted to do an IT request which may only take 1 hour, the total time for completing the project task PLUS the interruption isn’t going to be 4 hours. It’s more likely to be 5, and this is because it takes some time to get back to being fully productive.

We made a conscious effort not to measure tasks by elapsed time, and instead we tried to use “Level of Effort”. I thought that mapping points to hours would be a bit too convenient for observers to draw incorrect conclusions by just adding up the number of hours and comparing it against the number of points we achieved! By using Level of Effort points and taking into account the number of interruptions (at the end of the sprint the points showed us that we’d done an almost equal number of interruption points as we had done project points), it was clear that in future we need to buffer our estimations somewhat. 🙂

Agile ITOps: Day 4

Posted on November 29, 2012 by jamesbetteley

It’s day 4 of our first agile ITOps sprint and so far it’s pretty much going to script. Our estimation of how much work we would be able to get through is looking roughly in the right ballpark (for more details on how we did the estimating, and other stuff see Agile ITOps: Day 1)

Looking at our sprint board a couple of things are fairly apparent. Firstly, that we were right about the number and frequency of interruptions, and secondly that we’re going to need a bigger board:

We’re going to need a bigger board

One of the things we aimed to achieve with the sprint board was to raise the visibility of the constant “interruptions” we have to work on. To do this we decided to note down every “interruption” on a red/pink card. As you can see in the picture above, we’ve worked more on interruptions than we have on our committed tasks. This was exactly what we expected to see.

Another thing we expected to see was a correlation between the number of interruptions we had, and the amount of project work we achieved. It was expected that on days where there were a high degree of interruptions, the number of project points completed would drop off. That hasn’t quite materialised yet, as you’ll see in the burndown below:

2 Plus 2 Doesn’t Equal 4?

Another thing that we’re expecting to see is that the maths just don’t add up. What I’m saying is that I don’t expect the team to be 100% productive when you add up the completed tasks we committed to deliver, plus all the points we did on interruptions. The reality is that people can’t automatically switch from one task to another and not lose any productivity. At the end of this sprint I’m hoping to be able to get a rough estimate of this “lost time”. In due course I will try to see if there’s any relationship between the amount of “lost time” and the types of tasks/interruptions we work on, so that we can effectively “cost” some of our regular tasks.

Agile ITOps: Day 1

Posted on November 26, 2012 by jamesbetteley

Today we started day 1 of our first ever ITOps sprint. This all came about because we needed a way of working out our productivity on “project tasks”, as well as learning how to triage our interruptions a bit better. None of the IT Ops team had tried any form of agile before, so there’s a mix of excitement and apprehension at the moment! I’ve opted for the old skool cards and sprint board (we’re using scrum by the way – more on this in a bit) rather than using an IT based system like Jira. This is mainly because everyone’s co-located, but also because I think it’s a good way to advertise what we’re doing within the office, and it’s an easy way to introduce a team to scrum.

The team already had a backlog of projects, so it was quite an easy job to break these down into cards. First of all we prioritised the projects and then sized up a bunch of tasks. We’re guessing, for this first sprint, that we’ll probably be around 40% to 50% productive on these project tasks, while the rest of our time will be taken up by interruptions (IT requests, responding to inquiries, dealing with unexpected issues etc).

Sprint 1 – planned, or “committed” tasks are on green cards, while interruptions go on those lovely pinky-reddish ones.

I’m using a points system which is roughly equivalent to 1 point = 1 hour’s effort. This is a bit more granular than you might expect in a dev sprint, but since we’re dealing with a very high number of smaller tasks, I’ve opted for this slightly more granular scale.

As well as project work, there was also an existing list of IT requests which were in the queue waiting to be done. I wanted to “commit” to getting some of these done, so we planned them in to the sprint. I had originally thought of setting a goal of reducing the IT request queue by 30 tickets, and having that as a card, but I decided against this because I don’t feel it really represents a single task in it’s own right. I might change my mind about this at a later date though! So instead of doing that, we just chose the highest priority IT requests, and then arranged them by logical groupings (for instance, 3 IT requests to rebuild laptops would be grouped together). At the end of our planning session we had committed to achieving approximately 40% productivity.

Managing Interruptions

We expect at least 50% of our time to be taken up by interruptions – this is based on a best-guess estimate, and will be refined from one sprint to the next as we progress on our agile journey. Whenever we get an interruption, let’s say someone comes over and says his laptop is broken, or we get an email saying a printer has mysteriously stopped working, then we scribble down a very brief summary of this issue on a red/pink card and make a quick call on whether it’s a higher priority that our current “in progress” tasks. If it is, then it goes straight into “in progress”, and we might have to move something out of “in progress” if the interruption means we need to park it for a while. Otherwise, the interruption will go in the backlog or in the “to do” list, depending on urgency.

At the end of the sprint we’re expecting to see a whole lot more red cards than green ones in the “Done” column. Indeed, we’re only a couple of hours into the first sprint an already the interruption cards contribute more than a 4:1 ratio in terms of hours actually worked today!

Interruptions already outweigh “committed” tasks by 4:1 in terms of hours worked – looks like my 40% guess was a bit optimistic!

Triage and Priorities

One of the goals of this agile style of working is to get us to think a bit smarter when it comes to prioritising interruptions. It’s been felt in the past that interruptions always get given higher priority over our project work, when perhaps they shouldn’t have been. I suspect that in reality there’s a combination of reasons why the interruptions got done over project work: they’re usually smaller tasks, someone is usually telling you it’s urgent, it’s nice to help people out, and sometimes it’s not very easy to tell someone that you aren’t going to do their request because it’s not high enough priority. By writing the interruptions down on a card, and being able to look at the board and see a list of tasks we have committed to deliver, I’m hoping that we will be able to make better judgement calls on the priority, and also make it easier to show people that their requests are competing with a large number of other tasks which we’ve promised to get done.

Why Scrum?

I don’t actually see this as the perfect solution by any means, and as you might be able to tell already, there’s a slight leaning towards Kanban. I eventually want to go full-kanban, so to speak, but I feel that our scrum based approach provides a much easier introduction to agile concepts. Kanban seems to be much more geared towards an Ops style environment, with it’s continuous additions of tasks to the backlog and its rolling process. I think the pull based system and the focus on “Work In Progress” will provide some good tools for the ITOps team to manage their work flow. For now though, they’re getting down with a bit of scrum to get used to the terms and the ideas, and to understand what the hell the devs are talking about!

Retrospectives, burn-downs and Continuous Improvement

We’ll stick with scrum for a while and at the end of our sprint we’ll demo what project work we actually got through, as well as advertise the amount of IT requests we did, and the number of “interruptions” we successfully handled (although I don’t think I’ll keep calling them “interruptions” :-)). I’m also looking forward to our first retrospective, which we’ll be doing at the end of each sprint as a learning task – we want to see what we did well and what we did badly, as well as take a good look at our original estimations!

I’ll keep track of our burndown, and as the weeks go by I’ll try to give the team as much supporting metrics/information as I can, such as the number of hours since an interruption, the number of project tasks that are stuck in “In Progress” etc. But most important of all, we’re looking at this as a learning experience, an opportunity for us to improve the way we manage projects and a chance for everyone to get better at prioritising and estimating.

I’ll keep the posts coming whenever I get the chance!

PowerCLI: Reverting CI Agents to Snapshot

Posted on June 26, 2012 by jamesbetteley

My friend Ed’s capacity to automate stuff is quite awesome. Yesterday he automated a way of making our Continuous Integration system alert us when one of the agents went offline. This is already automated in our CI system, but it just wasn’t automated enough for Ed’s liking, so he wrote a script. His script will send us an email whenever an agent goes offline. I haven’t recieved any emails so far, so either the agents are all fine, or the script isn’t working – there’s no way to tell, so I expect Ed will automate a way of telling us whether the automated script has run successfully.

Then today, in the true spirit of “DevOps”, he tells me he has automated a way of reverting our CI agents to a snapshot and plugged it in to the CI system, for good measure. The CI agents are all VMs deployed by VMware, so Ed has used the PowerCLI plugin to do the automation.

Basically the script just iterates over a list of VMs which are in a particular resource pool, and reverts them all to a snaphot. Here’s the script itself:

connect-viserver myserver.mycompany.com -User username -Password secret

$vmcsv = import-csv $args[0]

ForEach($line in $vmcsv){
Get-VM $line.name | Get-Snapshot -Name $line.snap | Set-VM -VM $line.name -confirm:$false
Get-VM $line.name | Start-VM
}

disconnect-viserver -confirm:$false

import-csv looks something like this:

name, snap
linuxSvr1, snap1
xpSvr1, snap1
xpSvrIE7, snap1
w7SvrIE8, snap1
w7SvrIE9, snap1

Ed has added the execution of this script to our CI system, so any of the devs can revert their CI servers to a snapshot by simply pressing a button. They key thing here is to organise VMs into resource pools. We’ve got dedicated resource pools per dev team/project, so it’s safe enough to allow the devs to do this without running the risk of affecting anyone elses CI builds.

You can follow Ed on twitter (@ElMundio87) and check out his blog here: http://www.elmundio.net/blog/