How to use continuous improvement kung-fu to pay down technical debt

Abstract:

In this talk we will show how our team is learning about and using continuous improvement Toyota-style to help us reduce nagging technical debt. We will share our successes and failures as well as give you a taste of what focused continuous improvement and the scientific method can help a DevOps team het done.

We’ll show how our team was consumed by never ending emergencies and interruptions. We also had and drive-by shooting project management and plenty of release troubles galore. Learn how we are freeing up half of our team’s time (yes 50% !!) to tackle this critical work and still getting our important tasks and projects done.

We’ show you the basics of our continuous improvement process. It’s light and simple so we can walk you through our daily kata. We will explain the details of and around our technical debt projects. We will illustrate our initial obstacles and the some of the experiments we used to slay them! We will paint a vivid picture what it felt like to use science everyday instead of jumping to conclusions. We will share one key difference between a Cowboy and a Scientist and why we chose to become Scientists. We will discuss improving the performance of a constraint ala "The Phoenix Project" and "The Goal" in real life.

Speaker:

Kevin Behr