The old folk tale about “Stone Soup” provides valuable lessons for agile development and DevOps. Once upon a time, there was a hungry business with a CIO under pressure to feed the business with innovative new applications and services. All while doing more with less … Download the eBook: http://cainc.to/fxDHoE

1. DevOps, Agile, and the Story of
Stone Soup

2. I love the old folk tail about “Stone
Soup.”
Hungry travelers with nothing more than a cooking
pot, water and a large stone manage to get stingy
townsfolk to contribute ingredients to the “stone
soup” they were cooking.
As the soup was cooking, it always seemed to be
missing something each time it was tasted. A
villager would “remember” that they had a carrot
or an onion at home, then run and get it.
Finally, after all the villagers had each contributed
something to the soup pot, everyone shared a great
meal.

3. It’s a perfect example of
crowdsourcing …
but the idea of “stone soup” also provides
valuable lessons for agile development and
DevOps.
Let me tell my IT version of the story.

4. Once upon a time, there was a hungry
business …
… with a CIO under pressure to feed the business
with innovative new applications and services. All
while doing more with less.
Undaunted, she shakes things up by introducing
agile development into the organization.
“No more long cycle times and infrequent change.
It will be a continuous flow of value to the business
from the IT organization.”

5. But it was not so simple …
Compliance holds up a release because of serious
control breaches.
Call center operators are also being flooded with
complaints about the reliability of a new mobile
app.
IT Operations insist that every production change
go through a rigorous change management process.

6. “Where is the problem?” the CIO asks.
“No issues on our watch,” claims the IT Operations
manager. “We’re just tired of picking up the pieces after
shonky releases, especially when we’re constantly being
called in after hours to figure out application outages.”
In Security, the manager’s response is similar: “We’re just
doing our job. The last release had to be halted because
the exposures in the new code base were off the charts.
“If only they had called us earlier.”

7. Suddenly, the light goes on for one of
the development teams.
“What if we involve folks earlier in helping make
our agile soup?
“What if we accept that while being brilliant
code chefs and super at cooking apps, we’re
lousy at providing complete, secure and resilient
services?”

8. And so the teams start to invite other
groups to their soup-making IT
sessions.

9. IT Operations gets involved.
The development team tells IT Ops that they’re cooking up a
new set of apps based on microservices-style architecture.
This includes a new programming language and NoSQL
database, and asynchronous messaging over Restful APIs, but
there are performance concerns …
Happy to participate, the Ops team gets involved, providing
advice on network latency issues and modern monitoring
requirements …
… so a “resilience carrot” gets added to the soup.

10. Over in Security, analysts are asked for
advice.
“We suck at security,” admits the development
team. “Can you provide some guidance on securing
these new applications and the open source
components we’re using?”
“No problemo,” says Security – providing solid
advice on data encryption, mobile gateway security,
and security auditing, giving the dev team API
access to a range of security features they can easily
stir into the app.

11. Pretty soon, word about the tasty
‘application soup’ starts spreading,
and more groups want to get involved.
The API team gets advice from the Web team on
how to use service virtualization and test data
management tools to simulate constrained systems
and speed development.
The App Support group is invited to discuss how
establishing monitoring in pre-production will give
developers early warning into code-related defects.
Both teams agree that supportability should be
major design consideration … especially when folks
are dragged out of bed at 3:00 a.m.

12. Over time many other groups get to
add key ingredients to the soup.
In heavily regulated industries, that could be the
compliance team, or in an Internet of Things
project, industrial designers and plant engineers.
Even vendors with experience in implementing agile
at scale could be called in as “trusted advisors” –
your soup tasters.
Plus of course – finance, the call center, the IT
service team and HR could get involved to improve
the business potential, quality, reliability and
supportability of new applications.

13. … and so our intrepid CIO and her
business colleagues loves the new
Agile and DevOps soup.
Apps are delivered faster, with increased quality
and a better customer experience.
Business grows because the company can now
engage customers at scale.
The soup is fuel for their digital transformation.

14. The moral of the Agile Soup Story:
It’s not how agile you
are at cooking stones,
but how you get others
to contribute to the broth.

15. Get cooking with your own Agile and
DevOps Soup.
Read the eBook:
DevOps and Agile Operations: Insights from the
Experts