I've attended devopsday 2014 in Ghent. This was a nice experience and I liked the fact the focus was more on people instead of tools. At the end of the conference there was a retrospective on the first 5 years of devops. I could not stay to attend but still I want to chime in.

Doing devops since 2001

I've been implementing devops as developer since 2001. Only there was not a term for it. I introduced version control, configuration management (at least for the environment) and automatic deploys to production. At that time there were no tools and we didn't have automated tests yet. But we were doing something in mitigating human error in deployments.

After a while as developer I got involved in the Agile scene and I'm happy that it's also inspiring the system-admins.

What to improve

But there are still some kinks. When I first learned about Scrum I learned the theory: The Scrum framework consists of a set of Scrum Teams and their associated roles; Time-Boxes, Artifacts, and Rules. I learned about all these things. But there was no instruction how to implement this. How to convince teammembers and even management how this could benefit them. Until I read Scrum and XP from the Trenches from Henrik Kniberg.

We defined goals, ideal situation to work in. We are getting better at defining what devops is. I saw cool presentation from trendy companies who are doing devops. But hey they are convinced and they have support from management. I mis the link how to get my team inspired and convince management!

I work as a consultant for 'old' companies where it's harder to convince people to change. I'm missing the tools to aid in this. I feel like I'm at the start of the Agile movement trying to implement scrum years ago. There we had the same problem.

But we also need to be careful. We convinced management Agile/Scrum is a better way of managing knowledge work. It gave us SaFe or L.A.F.A.B.L.E the more funny counterpart.

We need a Devops from the trenches!