Introduction

Searching to adopt agility, I’ve found an Agile Adoption Framework^[1] that proved very useful in practice. It’s composed of a maturity model and an index to measure agility’s level.

This framework is a guide to develop a roadmap on agility adoption. First levels are essential to establish a basis for a solid adoption. Organizational change management is a must, as complementary discipline.

1. Principles

Fundamental principles^[2] of DevOps are distilled as follows:

Principle	Description
Flow Improvement	Eliminate waste in value streams.
Feedback Improvement	Reciprocal and fast feedback and feedforward.
Continual Learning and Experimentation	From individual knowledge to organizational knowledge.

2. Practices

Practices related to principles are categorised as follows:

Principle	Practice	Examples/Description
Flow Improvement	Make work visible	Kanban.
Flow Improvement	Limit WIP	Kanban.
Flow Improvement	Reduce batch size	Batch size of one.
Flow Improvement	Reduce number of handoffs	Automate tasks or reorganize teams to avoid dependencies.
Flow Improvement	Automate environment managing
Flow Improvement	Automate code deployment
Flow Improvement	Automate testing
Flow Improvement	Decouple architecture	To avoid dependencies or integrations that affects other systems (CAB).
Flow Improvement	Eliminate waste	Reduce hardship and drudgery.
Feedback Improvement	Working safely within complex systems	Problem solving and knowledge sharing.
Feedback Improvement	See problems as they occur	Measure and monitor process. Fast feedback. Measure product.

Principle	Practice	Examples/Description
Feedback Improvement	Swarm and solve problems to build new knowledge	Everyone helps to solve problems as they occur.
Feedback Improvement	Keep pushing quality closer to the source	Share quality responsibility among roles.
Feedback Improvement	Enable optimizing for upstream/downstream work centers	See next function in value chain as customer, and the previous one as “feedbackable”.
Continual Learning and Experimentation	Enabling organizational learning and a safe culture	Look for a safe system of work.
Continual Learning and Experimentation	Institutionalize the improvement of daily work	Find and fix problems in area of control.
Continual Learning and Experimentation	Transform local discoveries into global improvements	Share knowledge globally.
Continual Learning and Experimentation	Inject resilience patterns into our daily work	Netflix: chaos monkey.
Continual Learning and Experimentation	Leaders reinforce a learning culture	Metrics to improve processes.

3. Levels

Analysis of principles, practices plus feedback from Agile Adoption Framework^[1] results in the following level configuration proposal.

Level #	Name	Value or Quality
1	Collaborative	Enhancing communication and collaboration.
2	Automated	Automation of many tasks.
3	Safe Complex Systems	Strong downstream and upstream feeedback.
4	Safe Culture	Strong problem solving and knowledge sharing.
5	Resilient	Resilence as common practice.

4. Framework

Finally, the result framework combines principles, practices, levels, own experience, DevOps^[3] and Agile Adoption Framework^[1] patterns.

Conclusions

Even though this DevOps adoption framework is not as professional as Ahmed Sidky’s Agile Adoption Framework, it provides a guide to design a roadmap for DevOps adoption. Obviously the principles, practices and levels can be configured or adapted as neccesary. Finally, this is a work in progress given that it lacks of an index to measure DevOps adoption level in organizations. In a further post I’ll expose such index.

Your comments are important so we can share knowledge, ideas and thoughts about DevOps adoption.

References

[1] Sidky A., A Structured Approach to Adopting Agile Practices: The Agile Adoption Framework, 2007.
[2] Kim G., Debois P., Willis J., Humble J., The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, 2016.
[3] Kim G., Behr K., Spafford G., The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, 2018.