We tried an 'Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate, Lego and Scrum'

We tried an “Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate, Lego and Scrum”

In our other recent blog I mentioned that we recently went offsite to discuss “dev ops” or greater collaboration between all of our engineering teams.

Myself and the other development leads were trying to come up with a DevOps related activity, but researching the idea led us to a tried and tested activity which has been run many times before. We felt that using an established, refined and well reviewed ‘game’ would also give it some credibility amongst participants which was important when focusing on an area which as an organisation we aren’t currently strong at.

We came across “An Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate, Lego and Scrum”, which has been formalised into a book by @DanaPylayeva. This has been run at many agile and DevOps conferences and therefore we hoped would give us a better chance of meeting our goals.

We found it to be fun, informative, and raised some really interesting points, all of which were recorded during a ‘fishbowl retrospective’. We hope it has had an impact on people’s mentality (which it seems to have), but also that we can look back on the points discussed and ensure we are learning from them and making better decisions in future. Some great take aways that come to mind personally (aside from the obvious DevOps benefits) are:

• Cross training could be difficult and initially have a negative impact
  
• Not everyone has to be cross trained and the benefits can be slowly introduced in a manner that leads to less risk
  
• The impact of the number of people solely doing development reducing could be larger than expected
  
• The theory that simplicity of development ‘wins the day’ often needs reiterating
  

We will try and pass on feedback on the game and accompanying slides with Dana

I hope this insight helps. Feel free to comment, share and discuss

Chris Watkins