Metrics driven development and devops

A presentation at Agile 2014 in in Orlando, FL, USA by Karthik Gaekwad

There are many facets of devops, and we will spend our time in this presentation focusing on collecting and using metrics (business, application, system, etc.) and building a metrics driven culture in organizations.

We will define how we have seen devops progress in our organizations and how we’ve realized that different teams in our organizations can find common ground when teams (who have different roles) can work well together when they use metrics as the common language.

Karthik will talk about how we are using the principles from the Lean Startup to define our development cycles, sprints and using metrics to quantify how successful the products we are trying to come out with in R&D. Initially we started practicing devops on the dev and ops side of the house but realized this was still a black box to the business side of the house, so we pivoted to what our business actually understood, and that was metrics; today, we focus more on metrics (business and system level), and can fail or succeed fast to achieve our business goals faster than before.

Ernest will go into detail on how a large, mature SaaS organization uses metrics in conjunction with distributed agile development and DevOps to guide their development at scale. How much a product is used, how much each feature is used, and how much value each user gets out of it are key drivers for a business strategy - and it’s all information that’s emitted by a system. He’ll show how large companies have invested time in collecting and using these metrics to guide their decisions and influence their culture.