When DevOps Enterprises Collaborate: My Open Source Story
A consultant’s life is spent diving into problems and creating solutions before moving on to the next gig. There’s always another client, with another problem, in another city — and the cycle repeats. Year after year. Gig after gig.
Last week was different. On Sunday, I flew to Dallas, Texas with my colleague Kevin Tuskey to revisit a solution we worked on nearly four years ago. Code-named “DevOps Dashboard” at the time, today it’s known as the open source product Hygieia: an award-winning tool that helps organizations deliver higher quality software, faster. In the intervening years Capital One has done a wonderful job of maturing Hygieia with input from some of the leading DevOps enterprises including Verizon, Walmart and American Airlines, to name just a few.
On Monday and Tuesday, we convened at Verizon’s office to create an open source steering committee that will guide Hygieia’s future. Two days of collaboration yielded an integrated roadmap with each organization taking lead on some really cool features. We also created an organization model and cadence for our new committee to stay connected. In the coming weeks, I expect we’ll publish the roadmap and get input from the broader DevOps community on our plans.
My company SingleStone signed up to take lead on three features: simplified Hygieia on-boarding, proactive alerts and enhanced gamification. In the coming months, our designers and engineers will contribute to the Hygieia project while continuing to fulfill their normal client work.
While at Verizon, we toured their Texas Dojo, where they “up-skill their technical teams” with immersive 6-week experiences that are showing a positive return on the investment. It was fascinating to see the dojos in action and to pick up some of their tips. We even got to participate in the daily afternoon team stretches!
Consulting gigs come and go, but rarely do they come full circle. The opportunity to collaborate with DevOps enthusiasts who are passionate about delivering higher quality software—faster—was a complete rush. This was a week I won’t soon forget.
