DevOps Culture - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 175

maining steps will all be working with the same exact bits, causing confusion and
increasing errors. Therefore it is a global regression and we would not do it.
• Increase the flow of work. Now that the steps are done in a repeatable way, the
process can be analyzed and improved. For example, steps could be automated to
improve speed. Alternatively there may be steps where work is redone multiple
times; the duplicate work can be eliminated.
8.2.2 The Second Way: Improve Feedback
Afeedbackloopisestablishedwheninformation(acomplaintorrequest)iscommunicated
upstream or downstream. Amplifying feedback loops means making sure that what is
learned while going from left (dev) to right (ops) is communicated back to the left and
through the system again. Feedback (information about problems, concerns, or potential
improvements) is made visible rather than hidden. As we move from left to right, we learn
things; if the lessons learned are thrown away at the end, we have missed an opportunity to
improve the system. Conversely, if what we learn is amplified and made visible, it can be
used to improve the system.
Continuing our software release example, to put an emphasis on amplifying feedback
loops:
• Understand and respond to all customers, internal and external. Each step is a
customer of the previous steps in addition to the obvious “customer” at the end of
the process. Understanding the customer means understanding what the subsequent
steps need. Responding means there is a way for the customer to communicate and
a way to assure that the request is responded to.
• Shorten feedback loops. Shortening a feedback loop means making the commu-
nication as direct as possible. The more stages a message must pass through to
communicate, the less effective it will be. If the feedback is given to a manager,
who types it up and presents it to a vice president, who communicates it down to a
manager, who tells an engineer, you know you have too many steps. The loop is as
short as possible if the person who experienced the problem is able to directly
communicate it to the person who can fix the problem.
• Amplify all feedback. The opposite would be someone noticing a problem and
muddling through it with their own workaround. The person may think he or she is
being a hero for working around the problem, but actually the individual is hiding
the problem and preventing it from being fixed. Amplifying feedback makes the
issue more visible. It can be as simple as filing a bug report or as dramatic as stop-
ping the process until a management decision is made with regard to how to pro-