I just took part in a great podcast hosted by Electric Cloud in partnership with DZone with a round-table discussion on the importance of a healthy DevOps toolchain.

Participants in the podcast included:

Prashant Mohan, Product Manager for SmartBear’s software testing tools. @Prashz91

Lee Atchison, Senior Director, Strategic Architecture at New Relic. @leeatchison

Ian Buchanan, Developer Advocate at Atlassian. @devpartisan

Mark Miller, DevOps Evangelist at Sonatype. @EUSP | alldaydevops.com

Ravi Gadhia, Senior Solutions Engineer at GitHub.

Our hosts were:

Anders Wallgren, CTO at Electric Cloud. @anders_wallgren

and

Sam Fell, V.P. Marketing at Electric Cloud. @samueldfell

Key takeaways include:

The DevOps Toolchain as a Value Stream

It's important to look at the entire value stream looking at the lead time ladder and identifying bottlenecks where automation will add the greatest value.

You need to be able to see upstream and downstream to ensure you are adding value and not duplicating effort. Have a single set of integrated tools giving you vision into how the entire process is working. 

Think about what the code is seeing and how it's being affected.

Use Tools to Align People and Teams 

Given that the greatest challenge to implementing a DevOps methodology is culture, it's important for every member of the team to have visibility and access to metrics for every link in the toolchain. 

DevOps is enabling cultural transformation while security overlays the entire process.

Value stream mapping is the biggest hurdle companies need to get over. Once you understand the whole process and the outcomes you are trying to achieve every member of the team is able to see where they are contributing and where they are hindering the process.

Is There One Right Tool?

No; however, there's a correct set of tools for every organization and you determine this by choosing the right tool for the problem you are working to solve. Every tool has a purpose and it must integrate with every other tool and provide a holistic view of the process. There is value in standardization; however, be aware that the right tool might change. As such, tools need to be able for clients to change in and out.

The tools have to work together. You cannot expect companies to "rip and replace." It's too expensive, time-consuming, and there are a lot of people to be trained on the new tool.

Adapting to the Changing Environment

We need to be able to abstract out the details of the actual tools and focus on the outcome of the process versus the tool that's being used to achieve the outcome.

Tools must integrate into a platform that's easy and intuitive for team members to use. The tools need to provide access to data and vision into the entire pipeline for audit-ability and traceability. 

Think holistically about the entire DevOps toolchain.

Check out the full episode:

You can find Electric Cloud's write-up of the podcast here, and check out the previous episodes of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9).