Speaker

Bryan Finster

Bryan Finster

Defense Unicorns - Value Stream Architect

Rogers, Arkansas, United States

Bryan Finster is a software engineer with three decades of experience delivering systems for large enterprises. He is currently a value stream architect for Defense Unicorns, working to deliver secure software delivery platforms for the US Dept. of Defense and other federal agencies. He's a speaker and author on the topic of continuous delivery and the holistic changes to tools, methods, and mindset required to execute that workflow.

He is one of the maintainers of MinimumCD.org and the ScaledAgileDevOps.com parody framework
Deploy more and sleep better.

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • DevOps
  • Value stream management
  • Software Deveopment
  • Software Engineering
  • continuous delivery

The Rise and Fall of DevOps

Value delivery requires much more than adding tools or writing code faster. It requires a holistic system approach to optimize for rapid feedback on our value hypotheses.

In this talk, we’ll view the value delivery system as a series of links leading from the organization to the end user, and see how each link is a necessary objective for robust, sustainable delivery of value, starting with an organizational One Team approach and ending with rapid feedback and a full understanding of our customer’s needs. We will also address how each link is critical and how missing a link can derail our organizational alignment and value delivery goals.

Bringing our experience from different perspectives (top-down and bottom-up), we will provide insight into understanding and identifying your missing link(s).

Enterprise Platform as a Product

Building platforms to enable teams to improve value delivery can be a major force for improving outcomes of product delivery… if done correctly. This talk will discuss challenges and recommendations from lessons learned while implementing a global delivery platform in a Fortune 1 company.

Some key topics we will discuss:
- How an opinionated platform can improve business outcomes
- Strategies to drive adoption without mandates.
- Effective support at scale with minimal support staff
- Being customer-centric as an enterprise service

We'll also be touching on the importance of clear missions and goals from leadership and what happens when those are no longer in place.

Platforms are not silver bullets, but good platforms are a critical link in the chain if we want better outcomes.

Why Can't We CD?

As organizations move to continuous delivery, they will quickly discover that adding tooling will not get them there. We'll be discussing the common problems and how to overcome them that give teams the foundations to rapidly improve the flow of value.

Minimum Viable Continuous Delivery

"Accelerate" states, “Continuous delivery improves both delivery performance and quality, and also helps improve culture and reduce burnout and deployment pain.” Those of us who work this way know this is true. We also know that CD is a powerful tool for organizational improvement. Neither of these will be true if we aren’t using a real CD workflow. It is very common for teams and organizations to use incorrect definitions of CD. When they do, it harms outcomes, team morale, and is even causing CD to be banned in some organizations.

At the 2021 DevOps Enterprise Summit, several of us gathered at the Dockside Bar to discuss this problem we are witnessing. We formed a cross-industry group to try to help codify the minimum set of problems that need to be solved to see the benefits of continuous delivery in every context so everyone can live better lives. Three days later we published the first version of MinimumCD.org. A week later we accepted a pull request from one of the fathers of CD, Dave Farley.

In this talk, we will cover the set of fundamental problems to be solved to achieve CD and how working to solve those problems acts as forcing functions for finding and removing the waste and pain that so many organizations are suffering daily. Everyone in the value stream should live better lives, and solving these problems will go a long way to getting us there.

How to Misuse and Abuse DORA Metrics

Since the 2018 release of Accelerate, DORA metrics have grown in popularity to measure development. However, there has also been a growth in using them for the wrong reasons resulting in poor outcomes. In this talk, I’ll be discussing common problems we are seeing with the spread of DORA metrics, how to use them appropriately, and try to dispel the myth that there are only 4.

Bryan Finster

Defense Unicorns - Value Stream Architect

Rogers, Arkansas, United States