I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to listen to Brian Harry speak twice this week. (At work and at MHTA) I have been a big follower of Brian since the early TFS 2005 days, so I was pumped!!!
His talk was about DevOps and his VSTS teams journey. Below are some of the highlights I wrote down from his presentations.
- His team always strives to find the root cause of issues… Always!!!
- His team works in 3 week sprints.
- It takes his team about 2 weeks to push out VSTS updates to all locations.
- They push releases internally 1st which is a lot quicker.
- They have feature teams, with each feature team responsible for all aspects of there code. (e.g. Build, test, deploy, production support, etc…)
- Their feature teams have dedicated roles that are responsible for troubleshooting issues in production .
- Brian uses VSTS to help planning his farm tasks.
- You can not put a timeline on your DevOps journey. If so, there is a good chance you will fail.
- He highly recommended the book “Drive” by Daniel Pink!
- Merging is really expensive
- They have release branches and that is about it. (In addition to master\mainline)
- More “Shift Left” testing, which mean more unit testing.
- Feature flags are a huge part of DevOps
Overall I really enjoyed listening to him and was able to congratulate him on the success of TFS and VSTS.
