The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations

by Gene Kim

INSTITUTIONALIZE RITUALS TO PAY DOWN TECHNICAL DEBT In this section, we schedule rituals that help enforce the practice of reserving Dev and Ops time for improvement work, such as non-functional requirements, automation, etc. One of the easiest ways to do this is to schedule and conduct day- or week-long improvement blitzes, where everyone on a team (or in the entire organization) self-organizes to fix problems they care about—no feature work is allowed. It could be a problematic area of the code, environment, architecture, tooling, and so forth. These teams span the entire value stream, often combining Development, Operations, and Infosec engineers. Teams that typically don’t work together combine their skills and effort to improve a chosen area and then demonstrate their improvement to the rest of the company. In addition to the Lean-oriented terms kaizen blitz and improvement blitz, the technique of dedicated rituals for improvement work has also been called spring or fall cleanings and ticket queue inversion weeks. Other terms have also been used, such as hack days, hackathons, and 20% innovation time. Unfortunately, these specific rituals sometimes focus on product innovation and prototyping new market ideas, rather than on improvement work, and worse, they are often restricted to developers—which is considerably different than the goals of an improvement blitz.† Our goal during these blitzes is not to simply experiment and innovate for the sake of testing out new tec...