problems occur because of the ripple effect of not
knowing how everything flows and not being able to
visualize all work moving through the system. Having a
bird’s-eye view of how work flows from development to
production is essential to figuring out optimal ways to
get to the end goal of a working application that provides
value. Many teams use kanban boards to visualize work,
whether through an application like Jira or by simply
putting sticky notes with the workflow on a whiteboard
so that everyone can see what is being done and what
needs to be done. Using a kanban board can help a team
be more rational in what it expects to accomplish in a
given period of time. Figure 13-17 shows the first way of
DevOps, which is focused on systems and flow.
Figure 13-17 First Way: Systems and Flow
To accomplish work goals, you have to reduce work
units, or batches of work, so that they are more
streamlined to prevent workload traffic jams. In an Agile
sprint, it is common to work on a small set of features
during a two-week period to reduce how much is being
worked in a given interval of time. This allows developers
time to build the capability without being overwhelmed
or pulled in multiple directions. This also applies to the
operations side, as both sides are integral to success.
Developers can’t just rain app updates on their
operations teams without having a solid view of how
each update gets deployed and the operations teams
have to build a system that is able to handle the speed
and agility developers need. By having both developers
and operations work together to understand where
constraints are, you can optimize the system and move
faster.