I gave a talk at DevOps Summit Amsterdam on 14 November 2013 on Software Operability and Run Book Collaboration; here are the slides.
Thanks to Unicom Seminars for organising the event, and to all the attendees for some great questions and conversations over coffee.
The run book (or system operation manual) is traditionally written by the IT operations (Ops) team after software development is considered complete. However, this typically leads to operability problems being discovered with the software, operational concerns having been ignored, forgotten, or not fully addressed by the development (Dev) team. If the software development team writes a draft run book or draft operation manual, many of the operational problems typically found during pre-live system readiness testing can be caught and corrected much earlier. Because the development team needs to collaborate with the operations team in order to define and complete the various draft run book details, the operations team also gains early insight into the new software. Channels of communication, trust, and collaboration are established between the traditionally siloed Dev and Ops teams, which can help to establish and strengthen a DevOps approach to building and running software systems.
Do not carve the run book in stone; focus instead on the collaboration needed to write the draft.
I will be talking about run book collaboration at DevOps Summit in Amsterdam on 15 November 2013.
I will be speaking about Run Book Collaboration at the DevOps Summit in Amsterdam in November 2013:
Practical steps for larger organisations to try in order to improve Dev and Ops collaboration, especially via the System Operation Manual (or “Run Book”).
Early Bird ticket prices for the event end on October 14th – book with Unicom to secure your place.
DevOps star Benjamin Wooton (@benjaminwooton) has published the latest installment of his DevOpsFriday newsletter – Insight from DevOps Thought Leaders – at http://devopsfriday.com/devops120413.pdf, including articles by David Mytton of @serverdensity, Matt Watson of @Stackify, Sandy Walsh (@TheSandyWalsh) and the RethinkDB team (@rethinkdb).
I contributed the following article on software operability and why it is so important for today’s software systems; it takes the form of an interview, with Benjamin Wooton asking the questions.
The book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know is a useful collection of personal recommendations from experienced software practitioners around the world, and it contains some excellent advice for any thinking person engaged in software systems engineering.
However, it’s clear that even as recently as 2009 (when the book was published), there was very little focus amongst those who identify as software architects on making sure the software we design and built is operable by the operations teams on the “front line”. In fact, the only contributors who directly touch on software operabililty (aside from Michael Nygard, naturally) are Rebecca Parsons, Mncedisi Kasper, and Dave Anderson; four contributions out of 97.
Software Operability 