The principles of DevOps with “The Three Ways”

Today, I talk about the DevOps Three Ways approach. This three-way idea comes from an article in Gene Kim’s blog (“The Three Ways, The Principles Underpinning DevOps”).

We begin with the first way (“The First Way”).

The First Way

The first way — Systems Thinking — is illustrated by the following schema:

The idea behind Systems Thinking is to move the product as quickly as possible from left to right, from the developers to the operationals.
For this, we must proceed with optimizations of the system, but global, not local. At least the local optimizations must take into account the overall flow. Indeed, why to optimize locally a system — so at the developer level — if the product can not be put into production — at the operational level?

Concretely, the consequences of First Way are first of all never to transmit a known defect through the flow. For example, you should never let a software with bugs advance, because in the end someone will take care of it. And the software is likely to go back for you to correct it.

Then, when local optimization is done, take care that it does not create an overall degradation. For example, speeding up software development may seem like a good idea; but it is not so if in the end it leads to not being able to deliver the software because of a lack of quality for example.
Obviously, the best example of improvement in the first way is the…