What I learned about Microsoft doing DevOps: The end result

2018-01-26

The last couple of months I wrote 8 blog posts over what I learned from Microsoft doing DevOps:

  1. Moving to Agile & the Cloud
  2. Planning and alignment when scaling Agile
  3. A day in the life of an Engineer
  4. Running the business on metrics
  5. The architecture of VSTS
  6. Changing the story around security
  7. How to shift quality left in a cloud and DevOps world
  8. Deploying in a continuous delivery and cloud world or how to deploy on Monday morning

I loved writing these blogs and I got some great feedback so I hope it helps some people on their DevOps journey.

The following table really sums up what DevOps and Cloud did for the VSTS team:

The old world The new world
4-6 month milestones 3-week sprints
Horizontal teams Vertical teams
Personal offices Team rooms
Long planning cycles Continual Planning & Learning
PM, Dev, Test PM & Engineering
Yearly customer engagement Continual customer engagement
Feature branches Everyone in master
20+ person teams 8-12 person teams
Secret roadmap Publicly shared roadmap
Bug debt Zero debt
100 page spec documents Specs in PPT
Private repositories Open source
Deep organizational hierarchy Flattened organization hierarchy
Success is a measure of install numbers User satisfaction determines success
Features shipped once a year Features shipped every sprint
 
If you recognize yourself in the issues on the left you can absolutely find some inspiration in how to solve your issues in the blog posts mentioned above. Feel free to leave a comment or contact me on Twitter so we can continue the discussion and make sure that as many organizations as possible can benefit from everything the new Cloud and DevOps world offers.