SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners: Implement robust, secure, and scaled Agile solutions with the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

✍ Scribed by Robert Wen

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 330
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Discover how the DevOps approach with Scaled Agile Framework helps you develop and deliver high-quality, secured solutions with a reduced risk of production failures with this step-by-step guide

Key Features

• Explore the five elements of the CALMR approach to avoid product development challenges
• Use value stream management to introduce systems thinking and flow for product development
• Demonstrate how the CD pipeline combines practices and technology to optimize your value stream
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format

Book Description

Product development and release faces overlapping challenges due to the combined pressure of delivering high-quality products in shorter time-to-market cycles, along with maintaining proper operation and ensuring security in a complex high-tech environment. This calls for new ways of overcoming these challenges from design to development, to release, and beyond. SAFe® for DevOps Practitioners helps you use a DevOps approach with the Scaled Agile Framework and details how value streams help you resolve these challenges using examples and use cases.

The book begins by explaining how the CALMR approach makes DevOps effective in resolving product development roadblocks. Next, you'll learn to apply value stream management to establish a value stream that enables product development flow, measure its effectiveness through appropriate feedback loops, and find ways of improving it. Finally, you'll get to grips with implementing a continuous delivery pipeline that optimizes the value stream through four phases during release on demand. This book complements the latest SAFe DevOps courses, and you'll find it useful while studying for the SAFe DevOps Practitioner (SDP) certification.

By the end of this DevOps book, you'll have gained a clear understanding of how to achieve continuous execution and release on demand using DevOps and SAFe.

What you will learn

• Understand the important elements of the CALMR approach
• Discover how to organize around value using value stream mapping
• Measure your value stream using value stream metrics
• Improve your value stream with continuous learning
• Use continuous exploration to design high-quality and secure features
• Prevent rework and build in quality using continuous integration
• Automate delivery with continuous deployment
• Measure successful outcomes with Release on Demand

Who this book is for

This book is for IT professionals such as DevOps and DevSecOps practitioners, SREs, and managers who are interested in implementing DevOps practices using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) approach. Basic knowledge of DevOps and agile software development lifecycle and methodology will be helpful.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing SAFe® and DevOps
2. Culture of Shared Responsibility
3. Automation for Efficiency and Quality
4. Leveraging Lean Flow to Keep the Work Moving
5. Measuring the Process and Solution
6. Recovering from Production Failures
7. Mapping Your Value Streams
8. Measuring Value Stream Performance
9. Moving to the Future with Continuous Learning
10. Continuous Exploration and Finding New Features
11. Continuous Integration of Solution Development
12. Continuous Deployment to Production
13. Releasing on Demand to Realize Value
14. Avoiding Pitfalls and Diving into the Future

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Foreword
Contributors
About the reviewers
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introducing SAFe® and DevOps
Challenges organizations face in product development
TTM pressures
Understanding customer wants
Security and compliance
Ensuring quality
Competition
Meeting the challenges
An introduction to Agile
The rise and fall of Waterfall
The emergence of Agile
The addition of Lean
An introduction to DevOps
DevOps tools and technology
DevOps people and processes
The DevOps movement begins
Scaling DevOps with SAFe®
Looking at CALMR
Mapping your value stream
Running your value stream through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Including security in the process
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Part 1Approach – A Look at DevOps and SAFe® through CALMR
Chapter 2: Culture of Shared Responsibility
A culture for organizational change
What kind of culture?
How do we change the culture?
Lean-Agile mindset
The SAFe House of Lean
Adjusting the Agile Manifesto
The SAFe core values
SAFe principles
Taking an economic view
Applying systems thinking
Assuming variability and preserving options
Building incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
Basing milestones on an objective evaluation of working systems
Visualizing and limiting WIP, reducing batch sizes, and managing queue lengths
Applying cadence – synchronizing with cross-domain planning
Unlocking the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
Decentralizing decision-making
Organizing around value
Value streams
Classic value streams
Operational and development value streams
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 3: Automation for Efficiency and Quality
Pipelines and toolchains
Planning with Agile project management tools
Creating code and documentation
Continuous integration
Continuous integration versus continuous delivery versus continuous deployment
Orchestrating the change
Verifying quality
Packaging for deployment
Continuous deployment
Configuring environments with IaC
Releasing with configuration management and feature flags
Additional verification through advanced testing in the environment
Monitoring the environment
DevOps topologies
The system team
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 4: Leveraging Lean Flow to
Moving from project-based to product-based work
Monitoring queues
Where are our queues?
Little’s Law and cycle time
Kingman’s Formula
Project budgets versus value stream funding
Defined endpoint versus product life cycle
Cost centers versus business outcomes
Upfront risk identification versus spreading risks
Moving people to the work versus moving work to the people
Performing to plan versus learning
Misalignment versus transparent business objectives
Keeping batch sizes small
Small batch sizes decrease cycle time
Small batch sizes decrease risk
Small batch sizes limit WIP
Small batch sizes improve performance
Finding the ideal batch size
Making the work visible
Specifying workflow with additional columns
Flagging impediments and urgent issues
Policies for specifying exit criteria
Limiting WIP
Further reading
Questions
Summary
Chapter 5: Measuring the Process and Solution
Measuring solution delivery
Cycle time
Lead time
WIP
Throughput
Blockers and bottlenecks
Measuring with cumulative flow diagrams
Looking at full stack telemetry
Application performance monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring
Network monitoring
Log management
Observability
Measuring the value proposition
The Innovation Accounting framework
Pirate metrics
The Google HEART framework
Fit for Purpose metrics
Net promoter score
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 6: Recovering from Production Failures
Learning from failure
healthcare.gov (2013)
Atlassian cloud outage (2022)
Prevention – pulling the Andon Cord
SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
Release engineering
Launch coordination engineering
Preparation – chaos engineering
Chaos engineering principles
Running experiments in chaos engineering
Problem-solving – enabling recovery
Incident management roles
The incident command post
The incident state document
Setting up clear handoffs
Perseverance – rolling back or fixing forward
Rolling back with blue-green deployment
Rolling back with feature flags
Rolling forward using the CI/CD pipeline
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Part 2:Implement – Moving Toward Value Streams
Chapter 7: Mapping Your Value Streams
Aligning the organization’s mindset
Moving to SAFe
Moving to value streams
Setting the context for development value streams
Preparing for Value Stream identification
Creating the operational Value Stream
Finding solutions
Mapping the development Value Stream
Finding the process and workflow
Finding the people behind the process
Finding areas for improvement
Process step metrics
Value Stream metrics
Identifying the future development value stream
The DevOps transformation canvas
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 8: Measuring Value Stream Performance
Creating good measurements
Describing the goal or intended result
Understanding the method for measuring the goal
Selecting measures for each goal
Defining composite indices if needed
Defining targets or thresholds
Defining and documenting the selected measurements
DORA metrics
The DORA KPI metrics
DORA metric performance levels
Emerging trends from the State of DevOps report
Flow Framework® and Flow Metrics®
Flow Items
Flow Metrics
Measurements in SAFe
Measuring outcomes in SAFe
Measuring the Flow in SAFe
Measuring competency in SAFe
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 9: Moving to the Future with Continuous Learning
Understanding continuous learning
Personal mastery
Mental models
Shared vision
Team learning
Systems thinking
Applying the Improvement Kata
Closing the Lean Improvement Cycle
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Part 3:Optimize – Enabling a Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Chapter 10: Continuous Exploration and Finding New Features
Hypothesize customer value
Building with an MVP
Measuring with innovation accounting
Learning to pivot or persevere
The SAFe® Lean Startup Cycle
Collaboration and research
Collaboration with customers and stakeholders
Research activities
Architecting the solution
Architecting releasability
Designing security
Ensuring testability
Maintaining operations
Synthesizing the work
Completing the feature
Writing acceptance criteria using BDD
Prioritizing using WSJF
Preparing for PI planning
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 11: Continuous Integration of Solution Development
Developing the solution
Breaking down into stories
Collaborative development
Building in quality by “shifting left”
Version control
Designing to the system
Building the solution package
Version control practices
Testing practices
Testing end to end
Equivalent test environments
Test automation
Management of test data
Service virtualization
Testing nonfunctional requirements
Moving to staging
Staging environments
Blue-green deployments
System demo
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 12: Continuous Deployment to Production
Deploying to production
Increasing deployment frequency
Reducing risk
Verifying proper operation
Production testing
Test automation in production
Test data management
Testing NFRs
Monitoring the production environment
Full-stack telemetry
Visual displays
Federated monitoring
Responding and recovering when disaster strikes
Proactive detection
Cross-team collaboration
Chaos engineering
Session replay
Rollback and fix forward
Immutable architecture
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 13: Releasing on Demand to Realize Value
Releasing value to customers
Decoupling releases by component architecture
Canary releases
Stabilizing and operating the solution
Site reliability engineering
Failover and disaster recovery
Continuous Security Monitoring
Architecting for operations
Measuring the value
Innovation accounting
Proving/disproving the benefit hypothesis
Learning from the outcomes
Pivot or persevere
Relentless improvement
Additional Value Stream mapping sessions
Summary
Questions
Further reading
Chapter 14: Avoiding Pitfalls and Diving into the Future
Avoiding pitfalls
Understand the system
Start small
Start automating
Start automating the testing
Create environments, deployments, and monitoring
Measure, learn, and pivot
Emerging trends in DevOps
XOps
The Revolution model
Platform engineering
New technologies in DevOps
AIOps
GitOps
Frequently asked questions
What is DevOps?
What is the Scaled Agile Framework?
Do I need to adopt SAFe to move to DevOps?
Is DevOps only for those companies that develop for cloud environments?
What’s the best tool for doing _____?
How does DevSecOps fit into DevOps?
Summary
Further reading
Assessments
Chapter 1 – Introducing SAFe® and DevOps
Chapter 2 – Culture of Shared Responsibility
Chapter 3 – Automation for Efficiency and Quality
Chapter 4 – Leveraging Lean Flow to Keep the Work Moving
Chapter 5 – Measuring the Process and Solution
Chapter 6 – Recovering from Production Failures
Chapter 7 – Mapping your Value Streams
Chapter 8 – Measuring Value Stream Performance
Chapter 9 – Moving to the Future with Continuous Learning
Chapter 10 – Continuous Exploration and Finding New Features
Chapter 11 – Continuous Integration of Solution Development
Chapter 12 – Continuous Deployment to Production
Chapter 13 – Releasing on Demand to Realize Value
Index
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