Thursday, July 14, 2016

Presentation: Fail fast, fail often

My colleague William Henry and I just gave this presentation at LinuxCon in Tokyo. It ties into central DevOps concepts such as experimentation, constant iteration, and having a culture that supports these types of activities.

Here was the abstract:

Software projects were historically managed on a bet the farm model. They succeeded or they failed. And when they failed (as big software projects often did), the consequences were typically dire for, not only organizations as a whole, but for many of the individuals involved. Today, by contrast, many software and the development projects have evolved toward a much more incremental, iterative, and experimental process that takes cues from the open source model which excuses (and even rewards) certain types of failure.

In this session, we’ll discuss how failure can be turned into a positive. This includes the organizational dynamics associated with tolerating uncertain outcomes, the need to define acceptable failure parameters, and the technical means by which experimentation can be automated in ways that amplify the positive while minimizing the effect of negative outcomes.

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