SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners

SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners

by Robert Wen
Released December 2022
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781803231426

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Book description

Discover how the DevOps approach with Scaled Agile Framework helps you develop and deliver high-quality, secured solutions with a reduced risk of production failures with this step-by-step guide

Key Features

  • Explore the five elements of the CALMR approach to avoid product development challenges
  • Use value stream management to introduce systems thinking and flow for product development
  • Demonstrate how the CD pipeline combines practices and technology to optimize your value stream
  • Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format

Book Description

Product development and release faces overlapping challenges due to the combined pressure of delivering high-quality products in shorter time-to-market cycles, along with maintaining proper operation and ensuring security in a complex high-tech environment. This calls for new ways of overcoming these challenges from design to development, to release, and beyond. SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners helps you use a DevOps approach with the Scaled Agile Framework and details how value streams help you resolve these challenges using examples and use cases.

The book begins by explaining how the CALMR approach makes DevOps effective in resolving product development roadblocks. Next, you’ll learn to apply value stream management to establish a value stream that enables product development flow, measure its effectiveness through appropriate feedback loops, and find ways of improving it. Finally, you’ll get to grips with implementing a continuous delivery pipeline that optimizes the value stream through four phases during release on demand. This book complements the latest SAFe DevOps courses, and you’ll find it useful while studying for the SAFe DevOps Practitioner (SDP) certification.

By the end of this DevOps book, you’ll have gained a clear understanding of how to achieve continuous execution and release on demand using DevOps and SAFe.

What you will learn

  • Understand the important elements of the CALMR approach
  • Discover how to organize around value using value stream mapping
  • Measure your value stream using value stream metrics
  • Improve your value stream with continuous learning
  • Use continuous exploration to design high-quality and secure features
  • Prevent rework and build in quality using continuous integration
  • Automate delivery with continuous deployment
  • Measure successful outcomes with Release on Demand

Who this book is for

This book is for IT professionals such as DevOps and DevSecOps practitioners, SREs, and managers who are interested in implementing DevOps practices using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) approach. Basic knowledge of DevOps and agile software development lifecycle and methodology will be helpful.

Table of contents

  1. SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners
  2. Foreword
  3. Contributors
  4. About the author
  5. About the reviewers
  6. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the color images
    5. Conventions used
    6. Get in touch
    7. Share your thoughts
    8. Download a free PDF copy of this book
  7. Chapter 1: Introducing SAFe® and DevOps
    1. Challenges organizations face in product development
      1. TTM pressures
      2. Understanding customer wants
      3. Security and compliance
      4. Ensuring quality
      5. Competition
      6. Meeting the challenges
    2. An introduction to Agile
      1. The rise and fall of Waterfall
      2. The emergence of Agile
      3. The addition of Lean
    3. An introduction to DevOps
      1. DevOps tools and technology
      2. DevOps people and processes
      3. The DevOps movement begins
    4. Scaling DevOps with SAFe®
      1. Looking at CALMR
      2. Mapping your value stream
      3. Running your value stream through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
      4. Including security in the process
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  8. Part 1 Approach – A Look at DevOps and SAFe® through CALMR
  9. Chapter 2: Culture of Shared Responsibility
    1. A culture for organizational change
      1. What kind of culture?
      2. How do we change the culture?
    2. Lean-Agile mindset
      1. The SAFe House of Lean
      2. Adjusting the Agile Manifesto
      3. The SAFe core values
    3. SAFe principles
      1. Taking an economic view
      2. Applying systems thinking
      3. Assuming variability and preserving options
      4. Building incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
      5. Basing milestones on an objective evaluation of working systems
      6. Visualizing and limiting WIP, reducing batch sizes, and managing queue lengths
      7. Applying cadence – synchronizing with cross-domain planning
      8. Unlocking the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
      9. Decentralizing decision-making
      10. Organizing around value
    4. Value streams
      1. Classic value streams
      2. Operational and development value streams
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  10. Chapter 3: Automation for Efficiency and Quality
    1. Pipelines and toolchains
      1. Planning with Agile project management tools
      2. Creating code and documentation
    2. Continuous integration
      1. Continuous integration versus continuous delivery versus continuous deployment
      2. Orchestrating the change
      3. Verifying quality
      4. Packaging for deployment
    3. Continuous deployment
      1. Configuring environments with IaC
      2. Releasing with configuration management and feature flags
      3. Additional verification through advanced testing in the environment
      4. Monitoring the environment
    4. DevOps topologies
    5. The system team
    6. Summary
    7. Questions
    8. Further reading
  11. Chapter 4: Leveraging Lean Flow to Keep the Work Moving
    1. Making the work visible
      1. Specifying workflow with additional columns
      2. Flagging impediments and urgent issues
      3. Policies for specifying exit criteria
    2. Limiting WIP
    3. Keeping batch sizes small
      1. Small batch sizes decrease cycle time
      2. Small batch sizes decrease risk
      3. Small batch sizes limit WIP
      4. Small batch sizes improve performance
      5. Finding the ideal batch size
    4. Monitoring queues
      1. Where are our queues?
      2. Little’s Law and cycle time
      3. Kingman’s Formula
    5. Moving from project-based to product-based work
      1. Project budgets versus value stream funding
      2. Defined endpoint versus product life cycle
      3. Cost centers versus business outcomes
      4. Upfront risk identification versus spreading risks
      5. Moving people to the work versus moving work to the people
      6. Performing to plan versus learning
      7. Misalignment versus transparent business objectives
    6. Summary
    7. Questions
    8. Further reading
  12. Chapter 5: Measuring the Process and Solution
    1. Measuring solution delivery
      1. Cycle time
      2. Lead time
      3. WIP
      4. Throughput
      5. Blockers and bottlenecks
      6. Measuring with cumulative flow diagrams
    2. Looking at full stack telemetry
      1. Application performance monitoring
      2. Infrastructure monitoring
      3. Network monitoring
      4. Log management
      5. Observability
    3. Measuring the value proposition
      1. The Innovation Accounting framework
      2. Pirate metrics
      3. The Google HEART framework
      4. Fit for Purpose metrics
      5. Net promoter score
    4. Summary
    5. Questions
    6. Further reading
  13. Chapter 6: Recovering from Production Failures
    1. Learning from failure
      1. healthcare.gov (2013)
      2. Atlassian cloud outage (2022)
    2. Prevention – pulling the Andon Cord
      1. SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
      2. Release engineering
      3. Launch coordination engineering
    3. Preparation – chaos engineering
      1. Chaos engineering principles
      2. Running experiments in chaos engineering
    4. Problem-solving – enabling recovery
      1. Incident management roles
      2. The incident command post
      3. The incident state document
      4. Setting up clear handoffs
    5. Perseverance – rolling back or fixing forward
      1. Rolling back with blue/green deployment
      2. Rolling back with feature flags
      3. Rolling forward using the CI/CD pipeline
    6. Summary
    7. Questions
    8. Further reading
  14. Part 2:Implement – Moving Toward Value Streams
  15. Chapter 7: Mapping Your Value Streams
    1. Aligning the organization’s mindset
      1. Moving to SAFe
      2. Moving to value streams
    2. Setting the context for development value streams
      1. Preparing for value stream identification
      2. Creating the operational value stream
      3. Finding solutions
    3. Mapping the development value stream
      1. Finding the process and workflow
      2. Finding the people behind the process
    4. Finding areas for improvement
      1. Process step metrics
      2. Value stream metrics
      3. Identifying the future development value stream
      4. The DevOps transformation canvas
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  16. Chapter 8: Measuring Value Stream Performance
    1. Creating good measurements
      1. Describing the goal or intended result
      2. Understanding the method for measuring the goal
      3. Selecting measures for each goal
      4. Defining composite indices if needed
      5. Defining targets or thresholds
      6. Defining and documenting the selected measurements
    2. DORA metrics
      1. The DORA KPI metrics
      2. DORA metric performance levels
      3. Emerging trends from the State of DevOps report
    3. Flow Framework® and Flow Metrics®
      1. Flow Items
      2. Flow Metrics
    4. Measurements in SAFe
      1. Measuring outcomes in SAFe
      2. Measuring the Flow in SAFe
      3. Measuring competency in SAFe
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  17. Chapter 9: Moving to the Future with Continuous Learning
    1. Understanding continuous learning
      1. Personal mastery
      2. Mental models
      3. Shared vision
      4. Team learning
      5. Systems thinking
    2. Applying the Improvement Kata
    3. Closing the Lean Improvement Cycle
    4. Summary
    5. Questions
    6. Further reading
  18. Part 3:Optimize – Enabling a Continuous Delivery Pipeline
  19. Chapter 10: Continuous Exploration and Finding New Features
    1. Hypothesize customer value
      1. Building with an MVP
      2. Measuring with innovation accounting
      3. Learning to pivot or persevere
      4. The SAFe® Lean Startup Cycle
    2. Collaboration and research
      1. Collaboration with customers and stakeholders
      2. Research activities
    3. Architecting the solution
      1. Architecting releasability
      2. Designing security
      3. Ensuring testability
      4. Maintaining operations
    4. Synthesizing the work
      1. Completing the feature
      2. Writing acceptance criteria using BDD
      3. Prioritizing using WSJF
      4. Preparing for PI planning
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  20. Chapter 11: Continuous Integration of Solution Development
    1. Developing the solution
      1. Breaking down into stories
      2. Collaborative development
      3. Building in quality by “shifting left”
      4. Version control
      5. Designing to the system
    2. Building the solution package
      1. Version control practices
      2. Testing practices
    3. Testing end to end
      1. Equivalent test environments
      2. Test automation
      3. Management of test data
      4. Service virtualization
      5. Testing nonfunctional requirements
    4. Moving to staging
      1. Staging environments
      2. Blue/green deployments
      3. System demo
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  21. Chapter 12: Continuous Deployment to Production
    1. Deploying to production
      1. Increasing deployment frequency
      2. Reducing risk
    2. Verifying proper operation
      1. Production testing
      2. Test automation in production
      3. Test data management
      4. Testing NFRs
    3. Monitoring the production environment
      1. Full-stack telemetry
      2. Visual displays
      3. Federated monitoring
    4. Responding and recovering when disaster strikes
      1. Proactive detection
      2. Cross-team collaboration
      3. Chaos engineering
      4. Session replay
      5. Rollback and fix forward
      6. Immutable architecture
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  22. Chapter 13: Releasing on Demand to Realize Value
    1. Releasing value to customers
      1. Decoupling releases by component architecture
      2. Canary releases
    2. Stabilizing and operating the solution
      1. Site reliability engineering
      2. Failover and disaster recovery
      3. Continuous Security Monitoring
      4. Architecting for operations
    3. Measuring the value
      1. Innovation accounting
      2. Proving/disproving the benefit hypothesis
    4. Learning from the outcomes
      1. Pivot or persevere
      2. Relentless improvement
      3. Additional value stream mapping sessions
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
    7. Further reading
  23. Chapter 14: Avoiding Pitfalls and Diving into the Future
    1. Avoiding pitfalls
      1. Understand the system
      2. Start small
      3. Start automating
      4. Start automating the testing
      5. Create environments, deployments, and monitoring
      6. Measure, learn, and pivot
    2. Emerging trends in DevOps
      1. XOps
      2. The Revolution model
      3. Platform engineering
    3. New technologies in DevOps
      1. AIOps
      2. GitOps
    4. Frequently asked questions
      1. What is DevOps?
      2. What is the Scaled Agile Framework®?
      3. Do I need to adopt SAFe to move to DevOps?
      4. Is DevOps only for those companies that develop for cloud environments?
      5. What’s the best tool for doing ___________?
      6. How does DevSecOps fit into DevOps?
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  24. Assessment Answers
    1. Chapter 1 – Introducing SAFe® and DevOps
    2. Chapter 2 – Culture of Shared Responsibility
    3. Chapter 3 – Automation for Efficiency and Quality
    4. Chapter 4 – Leveraging Lean Flow to Keep the Work Moving
    5. Chapter 5 – Measuring the Process and Solution
    6. Chapter 6 – Recovering from Production Failures
    7. Chapter 7 – Mapping your Value Streams
    8. Chapter 8 – Measuring Value Stream Performance
    9. Chapter 9 – Moving to the Future with Continuous Learning
    10. Chapter 10 – Continuous Exploration and Finding New Features
    11. Chapter 11 – Continuous Integration of Solution Development
    12. Chapter 12 – Continuous Deployment to Production
    13. Chapter 13 – Releasing on Demand to Realize Value
  25. Index
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  26. Other Books You May Enjoy
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Product information

  • Title: SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners
  • Author(s): Robert Wen
  • Release date: December 2022
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781803231426