• XSCALE Product Management (XPM) which aligns tech, design and business leaders, breadth-first, to form a product squad that continuously distils value stream drivers and constraints into a maximum-impact release plan.
• XSCALE Business Agility (XBA) which generates self-directing portfolios of self-managing value streams that continuously identify and prioritise bottlenecks in business throughput and learning flow across the organization..
XSCALE DevOps is about the five questions ….
- How do you minimise tech debt and flatten the cost of change curve?
- How do you optimise team ceremonies and tool use for self-organisation?
- How do you reconcile consensus decision-making with individual responsibilities?
- How do you empower the team to share ownership of architecture and outcomes?
- How do you maximise the amount of work not done to get the job done?
… that enable the rapid delivery, reliability, scale and security critical to your business success.
The XDOP course is purely pragmatic, giving hands-on experience in the direct application of high performance practices to your specific delivery context.
Why learn about XSCALE DevOps?
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. – Agile Manifesto Principle 9
DevOps is grounded in Beck’s XP mantra of flattening the cost of change curve. Scrum doesn’t require continuous attention to technical excellence and good design, which makes ita problem for agile to solve. XDO applies YAGNI and the 9th principle to all functions of a value stream through Kim’s “three ways”:1. Continuously improving flow of value by prioritising bottleneck constraints.
2. Continuously improving flow of work by shortening and accelerating feedback loops.
3. Continuously improving flow of learning by scientific experimentation and merciless refactoring.
Who
XDO provides training and coaching for self-organizing teams of Developers, Testers, Business Analysts, Designers, Architects, Managers, Operations and Change Leaders. It varies team responsibilities and missions via rotating councils of chapter representatives using the “Game Without Thrones”.
This arrangement answers the longstanding DevOps question of whether and when to merge delivery and operations into a single team. As these two functions have different constraints, competencies and cadences, XDO empowers chapters and councils to address the question continuously via Leadership as a Service.
XDO also provides q quick way for existing DevOps and Systems teams to get up to speed in Agile best practices too.
How
XDO starts with Scrumban practices: pulling the work through Stream Kanbans, standup meetings that walk the wall, squad showcase and retro ceremonies, definitions of ready/done, and grooming backlogs both with and without estimates.
XDO coordinates the work of delivery and operations teams in a 3D Kanban on daily and weekly cadences. This minimises overhead for product, quality and portfolio management workflows. Small, autonomous squads aligned by small chapters and small councils continuously self-manage using mission-command, pairing, mobbing and standups instead of command-and-control and big-room meetings.
Then it uses Lego simulation and BDD as process bridges to teach XP. It combines these with Leadership as a Service to distribute the work and generating truly self-organizing teams.
XDO’s weekly cadence synchronises ceremonies for feature reviews, chapters, councils and retros. Its daily cadence walks the wall to balance planned work against root cause analysis of operational incidents. Stream councils include Ops chapter representatives working as peers to business and design stakeholder so that Leadership as a Service enables them to continuously adapt priorities to stream bottlenecks.
What
Extreme Programming is a proper superset of Scrum practices. That’s to say Scrum introduced no beneficial practices that were not already in XP, but simply out-marketed it by slowing it down and leaving out the elements that require technical understanding. XAP combines XP with BDD so that this understanding isn’t necessary for non-technical team members to contribute to technical outcomes.
As a self-reinforcing language of small-team engineering practices, XP applies continuous feedback to minimise technical debt and maximise the efficiency of collaboration. Critical XP practices include test-first delivery, promiscuous pairing, shared ownership using DVCS, merciless refactoring, continuous integration, simplest working thing, release planning, sustainable pace, self-documenting code and “You Aren’t Gonna Need It” (YAGNI).
Scrumban combines Kanban, the first and simplest Lean method, with the collaborative ceremonies that gave Scrum its form. It replaces the weaker aspects of Scrum with one-piece flow, continuously pulling backlog items into a “done” state rather than pushing new work into progress to maintain needless sprint commitments. Instead, XAP manages those commitments by combining Scrumban with XPM‘s breadth-first feature-based release planning to make the simplest possible continuous Agile value stream.
Leadership as a Service is a protocol that minimises politics and speeds the flow of learnings within and between teams. Already a part of the XP planning game, XAP applies this protocol to replace Scrum roles with DRIs and consensus decision-making.
Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CICD) enables multiple Feature teams to release asynchronously without tripping over each others’ feet or centralising ownership of technical components. More importantly, it enables the XP “Merciless Refactoring” practice which is just too risky to do without it. Modern software engineering plugs Decentralised Version Control (DVCS) and CICD together, and XAP shows how to combine them with BDD to decouple silos and decentralise dependencies.
Stream Kanban & Throughput Diagrams provide a continuous view of workflow across multiple teams per stream. Throughput diagrams combine business analytics with workflow cumulative flow curves to make it easy for teams to visualise and open their mutual bottlenecks. XAP uses physical cards on a wall to teach teams how to generate and combine these artefacts to coordinate delivery priorities continuously without requiring big-room planning meetings.
Git Workflows provides the most effective methods to coordinate the work products of delivery and operations teams . Proven on enormous scales in the development of the Linux kernel, in XSCALE these git workflows are tailored by treaty to empower teams and streams to share ownership of their codebases, data environments, infrastructure as code and pipeline as code across teams and streams.
Game Without Thrones is a pattern language derived from the Haudenosaunee Great Treaty Of Peace that minimises politics while speeding the flow of learnings within and between teams. It replaces Scrum roles with DRIs and Leadership as a Service to optimise the three “de-scaling metrics”: meeting size, collaboration loop length, and feedback frequency. It maximises direct participation in decision-making across hierarchy through its rotating system of chapters and councils.