DevOps – Derk-Jan de Grood

Development and operations. Not the same…

Although they work side by side in service of the same business goals, development and operations often experience tension or misunderstanding.

In this article, I deep-dive the differences, that usually isn’t caused by bad intentions, but by fundamentally different responsibilities. Development is about change and new capabilities, while operations is about stability, reliability and risk.

Based on my experience coaching operations teams, I introduce a simple bucket approach that helps teams consciously balance urgent work with long-term improvement. Finally, I reflect on the role of the operations product owner, who must make decisions under pressure, protect team sustainability and clearly communicate invisible but essential value.

Thanks Nieke Roos, for the editing and Bits&Chips for publishing it. You can check it out yourself; Development and operation: different goals and ways to plan their work.

Agile Technical Practices – If only you knew them!

In Agile Technical Practices, authors Pedro Moreira Santos, Marco Consolaro, and Alessandro Di Gioia advocate for practices like Pair Programming and Test-Driven Development (TDD). Their comprehensive guide navigates through intricate design and refactoring methodologies, fostering code readability and resilience. The book describes a limited yet crucial set of practices. However, the deep dive and the insights provided in the book make them applicable for developers.

Besides the three key practices that Pedro, Marco, and Alessandro distill and describe, there are other practices worth knowing as well.

In Agile Technical Practices – If only you knew them !, my latest article that I wrote for Agile Connection, I tell more about the book and explain why I think it matters: books like this make organizations aware that effective value delivery is most likely obtained by proficient developers who know, talk about, and apply these practices. I am truly glad that I am not alone in this important vision. I wonder if you know of more books like this.

Speaking at Agile DevOps East 2021

I am thrilled to announce my contribution to the Agile DevOps conference that is organized by TechWell coming November. I will speak about refinement and how to unlock its potential.

Good refinement makes development more predictable, leads to better solutions, and enables the Product Owner to set the right priorities. Still, many teams fail to unlock the full potential of refinement. Not only is the time spent on refinement often limited, but many of the refinement meetings I join are also inefficient. Join this session if you are an Agile Coach of SM and want to help your team(s) to get more out of refinement. If you are a PO and feel a need to boost quality and predictability, or if you are a member of a distributed team and want to involve your fellow team members.

More information can be found on the conference website: Agile DevOps East 2021

Launching my new book: The waves of Agile

On 5 July I will be presenting my new book: The waves of agile, Value delivery in medium and large organizations. In a free webinar we will celebrate that the book is finished. Join me in this event and I’ll explain what the book is about and we’ll have nice contributions from Nils van Schaik and Wilco Dona.

We’ll have the following program:

How to deal with change? – Nils van Schaik (Director at Squerist)

The customer in the driver seat – An interview by Vincent Verloop (Agile Consultant at Squerist) with Wilco Dona (Head of products at RTL)

Introduction to ‘The Waves of Agile’ – Derk-Jan de Grood (Agile Coach at Squerist )

More information about the book can be found in the book session on this blog.
Please join us on Monday July 5 between 16:00 and 17:00. You can reserve your seat by registering on the event page

The Relevance of Built in Quality

With Valori we published a new eBook in the series on Digital transformation.

This publication is a follow up on the trend report that was released earlier this year. In this previous ebook we described disruptive trends and explained why organisations need to become adaptive. In this second edition we focus on the development practises that companies embrace to do so. In the first part we describe how Agile, DevOps, CI/CD and Scaling contribute to business agility. I believe it is a nice introduction for managers, stakeholders and professionals that are not entirely familiar with these development practises.

The second part of the eBook deals with Built in Quality. We state that the concept of creating fast feedback loops crumbles when you cannot release frequently. Without confidence in system quality, we cannot make quick adjustments and receive no feedback on the impact of implemented improvements. Built in Quality provides the confidence in the quality of the systems so that we dare to change them frequently and take them into production. In the eBook we introduce the built in quality circle. It provides an overview of the steps in the development cycle and where errors can be prevented.

I am proud of my contribution to this eBook and hope you find it useful. You can download your free copy of Hoe word je wendbaar als organisatie? – Het belang van built in quality from the Valori site.

How do you unlock the power of Agile?

10 October the Agile Consortium will organise their annual conference in Doorn (the Netherlands). The theme of the conference is: Unleash! Balancing structure and Autonomy.

About the theme: Many organisations struggle with transforming into a flexible organisation. Some organisations have completely or partially reversed their Agile transformation and ask: Does the transformation to an agile organisation actually have the intended effects? The answer to this question can be confronting …On the other hand, we know of organisations where the transformation to an agile organisation is a success. Organizations where motivated employees and teams deliver the right value to a satisfied customer every day. How have these organisations succeeded? How do you unlock the power of Agile? This is the central question this year that the Agile Consortium’s annual congress wants to answer.

It promises to be a day full of interesting presentation and workshops. Mark 10 October in your calendar, and check the program. As the program is being made the website is updated in short iterations. Check out the preliminary program on the conference website.

Bringing the DevOpsImprovement Game to Ibiza

This weekend Innspire and Fincalabs host the Agile Coaching Summit – Digital Innovation Camp on the beatiful island of Ibiza. I was thrilled to participate and did the Valori DevOpsImprovement game. We had great fun playing it and had a fruitfull debate afterwards.

DevOpsImprovement Game – Maximise business value without ignoring operational responsibilities

DevOps teams have to balance their work between three types of tasks. Development, Operational tasks and Improvements. Many DevOps teams (and that includes the PO) are struggling with balancing between the three types of work. Often Ops work uses up much of the time reducing the adaptivity of the business, while other teams focus heavily on new features and create too much technical debt.

To get a feel about this challenge we created a serious game, called the DevOpsImprovement Game. In this game teams experience how to have a maximum of business value in a sustainable way without ignoring operational responsibilities.

I have posted some impressions of the game before, but I proudly present DevOpsImprovement- The Video.

Thanks Jana, Philip, Karlijn and Thomas for sharing your impression of the game

Gamification of the DevOpsImprovement challenge

Yesterday we piloted the new DevOpsImprovement game.

Many DevOps teams (and that includes the PO) are struggling with balancing between Development work, operational tasks and improvements. Depending on the organisational context and the team members, there often is a focus on one of the three types of work. In the Dev, Ops & Improvement game teams experience the benefit of improving your way of working and balancing between short term and long-term benefits. In the game teams experience that often the way to being proactive and innovative is by reducing the time spent on operational task by sufficient improvements like automation, CI/CD and developing team skills. The goal of this interactive card game is to have a maximum of business value in a sustainable way without ignoring operational responsibilities and creating technical dept.

During the agile guild meeting at Valori we held the first trial run. We made some improvements and will present the game at the NN Agile day, later this month. The participants were enthusiastic: ” it gives examples on how certain improvements can benefit the organisation”, “the events are really recognisable, we have them as well”, “it triggers discussion between teams” and “since it can be done in an hour, I can easily do it during retrospective or e.g. at a lunch session”.