Fight Club - Legacy; Enterprise; and DevOps

Project and Program: DevOps in the Enterprise, SHARE-wide Events

Tags: Proceedings, 2016, SHARE in San Antonio 2016

I've spent the last few years incorporating continuous deliver into the Power Firmware organization at IBM.  The software; people; and process's have been around for 15+ years; and are responsible for delivering the firmware and software for IBM POWER servers.
The focus of this presentation will be on the lessons learned while shifting this group to a continuous delivery process.   We have legacy SCM's; legacy build/test tools; and lots of "legacy-biased" people. 
The challenges: • Internal SCM that last had a new feature 15 years ago
• A development and build team that has been doing something the same way for 15+ years and has grown very accustomed to it
• A 500+ team spread across 3 sites
• The complexity of the infrastructure and testing process's
• Development and build team trust in the automation process
• A customer base that expects enterprise software on a regular basis

The pitfalls • Forcing people to change without first showing them the benefits
• Doing something good; but not involving the person that will have to own it
• Using new technology just to be cool - "I'm going to dockerize that email jenkins slave job...I'm so cool"
• Breaking the legacy process while getting the new process going

The solutions: • Being creative with tying into historic SCM's
• Small steps that show the advantages to the team; and then changing the process to enforce those new advantages - "Yes; I'm sorry the new process now prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot"
• Focusing on small improvements (everyone says it but doing it is much tougher!)
• Somewhat contrarian but using existing process's as much as possible; except you make them visible to the world
• Rolling up the sleeves and being proactive on all automation failures (showing everyone there's someone that really cares)
• The amazing trifecta power of git/gerrit/jenkins!

The abstract title says it all.  It's been a lot like a fight club (i.e. lots of beating) but everyone is pretty happy in the end.-Andrew Geissler-IBM

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