Talks
Here’s a selection from the talks I’ve given over recent years, with links to video recordings and slides. All my material is licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike. In addition to my industry work, I also teach a class on lean/agile product management at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. You can find my class materials here.
Continuous Delivery Sounds Great But It Won’t Work Here
Since the Continuous Delivery book came out in 2010, it’s gone from being a controversial idea to a commonplace… until you consider that many people who say they are doing it aren’t really, and there are still plenty of places that consider it crazy talk. In this session Jez will present some of the highlights and lowlights of the past six years listening to people explain why continuous delivery won’t work, and what he learned in the process.
Why Scaling Agile Doesn’t Work
There are now several frameworks designed to address the demand for “big agile.”
In this talk Jez will explain the flaws in such frameworks, why they so often fail to produce the desired effects, and what we should do instead. He will also address some common organizational obstacles to moving fast at scale: governance, budgeting, and the project paradigm - and discuss how to address them. Warning: this talk will include liberal use of real, statistically sound data.
Leading a DevOps Transformation
Implementing DevOps is more than just implementing tools. It requires thinking – and acting – differently about everything from budgeting and program management to architecture and compliance. In this talk, Jez presents what DevOps is and, just as importantly, what it isn’t from the leadership perspective, and takes you through the journey you’ll need to embark on in order to achieve the outcomes DevOps promises.
Architecting for Continuous Delivery
DevOps and Continuous Delivery represent a new paradigm for IT service delivery that promises higher quality and stability as well as faster time-to-market. However deploying this new paradigm requires changes to both organizational culture and architecture. In this talk, Jez will present the architectural principles and patterns that enable continuous delivery at internet scale, and discuss how to incrementally evolve existing systems in order to deploy them.
Cloud Native in the US Federal Government
Going cloud native in a highly regulated context presents challenges of its own. In this talk, Jez Humble will share with you the platform created by the cloud.gov team at 18F, and the benefits it brought to federal agencies seeking to use the cloud.
The DevOps Transformation
DevOps promises to transform the way we work. By creating reliable, secure distributed systems that can also be rapidly evolved in response to user feedback, we can create lasting competitive advantage. In this talk Jez will describe how to implement devops principles and practices, how to overcome typical obstacles, and the outcomes DevOps enables.
What We Learned from Four Years of Sciencing the Crap Out of DevOps
slides | video (25m with Nicole Forsgren)
For years we laboured under the misapprehension that going faster meant breaking things. After several years of science-ing, Nicole and Jez have identified the key elements that enable not just higher throughput but also higher stability and quality, lower cost, and happier teams. Discover how continuous delivery and lean management practices produce higher IT performance (and indeed what we might mean by performance), along with how to measure culture and its impact on IT and organizational culture. Find out how we actually ensure our results are reliable and meaningful. Learn the patterns and practices used by high performing organizations to outcompete their peers.
21st Century Software Delivery
For many years software engineering meant delivering software the way we constructed buildings. This turns out to be a wildly inefficient way to create innovative products and services based on software. In this talk I’ll discuss what makes software different from buildings, and how we can take advantage of its unique properties to satisfy our customers through continuously delivery of valuable software. I’ll also talk about how you can adopt these practices in the safety of your own office, and explore the art of the possible and the patterns and practices used by high performing companies.
Lean Enterprise
slides | video (50m) | video (1h40m with Gary Gruver)
Large organizations often struggle to leverage software to create innovative products. This is due to a number of organizational factors, including culture, governance and financial management, and the application of portfolio and program management strategies that do not take advantage of the unique characteristics of software. This talk discusses how to take a lean approach to developing new products and running large scale programs of work, and how to grow a culture that enables organizations to turn software into a competitive advantage.
Continuous Delivery
slides | video (45m) | video (with Martin Fowler)
Businesses rely on getting valuable new software into the hands of users as fast as possible, while making sure that they keep their production environments stable. Continuous Delivery is a revolutionary and scalable approach to software delivery that enables any team, including teams within enterprise IT organizations, to achieve rapid, reliable releases through better collaboration between developers, testers, DBAs and operations, and automation of the build, deploy, test and release process.
I’ll start by discussing the value of CD to the business, inspired by the lean startup movement. I’ll then present the principles and practices involved in continuous delivery, including value stream mapping, the deployment pipeline, acceptance test driven development, zero-downtime releases, and incremental development. I’ll cover how CD is enabled by an ecosystem including Devops, cloud computing, agile testing, and continuous deployment. Finally I’ll talk about how continuous delivery can co-exist with ITIL and compliance in an enterprise environment.
Creating Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests
Creating automated end-to-end functional acceptance tests is hard. Maintaining them over time is harder. Some agilistas even claim that the cost outweighs the benefit. In this lecture we present five principles for creating valuable, maintainable acceptance test suites. We discuss practices such as layering acceptance tests to reduce coupling between the test harness, and talk about how teams should be organized in order to efficiently manage acceptance test driven development. The core of the talk discusses how to manage the evolution of acceptance tests by organizing them as scenarios rather than as suites of story tests. Finally we show how to manage data for acceptance tests.
Stop Hiring Devops Experts (And Start Growing Them)
Everyone is putting “devops” on their LinkedIn profile, and everyone is trying to hire them. In this talk, Jez will argue this is not a recruitment problem but an organizations failure. This talk discusses how to grow great people and great organizations, and how the two problems are connected.
