DevOps Articles

Eric’s three ways

In The Phoenix Project, Eric describes to Bill the principles from where DevOps patterns can be derived from as “The Three Ways.” He learnt the three ways in-plant manufacturing but they were applicable in IT as well.

The three ways move around : The First Way is about the left-to-right flow of work from Development to IT Operations to the customer.

The necessary practices include “stopping the production line” when our builds and tests fail in the deployment pipeline; constantly elevating the improvement of daily work over daily work; creating fast automated test suites to ensure that code is always in a potentially deployable state; creating shared goals and shared pain between Development and IT Operations; and creating pervasive production telemetry so that everyone can see whether code and environments are operating as designed and that customer goals are being met.

The necessary practices include creating a culture of innovation and risk-taking (as opposed to fear or mindless order taking) and high trust (as opposed to low trust, command-and-control), allocating at least twenty per cent of Development and IT Operations cycles towards nonfunctional requirements, and constant reinforcement that improvements are encouraged and celebrated.