So today I’ve had my first DevOpsday. Which is short for Great! Because is wasngreat and I learned a lot.

This was the first DevOpsday in the Netherlands and the day was divided into 3nparts, talks, open spaces and BBQ.

I can be short about the BBQ, it was good, like lunch and breakfast!n< !–more –>nBut I’m not going to talk about food here but about the DevOpsDays

So what’s DevOps?

DevOps (a combination of development and operations) is a softwarendevelopment method that stresses communication, collaboration and integrationnbetween software developers and information technology (IT) professionals.

Now, at the company where I work we already do DevOps and I did not even knownit. My two teams are small and we don’t have a IT team for the stuff wendevelop. We have a external party that helps us with Webserver relatednproblems (like hardware problems), but most of the IT stuff we do ourselves.

And that collaboration is going well. For me this day was more to see hownother teams solve certain problems. So we don’t do continuous integration andntest driven development (yet!), but we’ve made a start and will be slowlynworking towards those goals of this way of working and testing. But I wantednto know more about it.

And what about Agile, Scrum and Kanban. How are other teams working with thesenmethods and what problems do they have and how do they solve them.

Now the first part of the day were talks:

• Miel Donkers: Successful testing the continuous delivery process
• Michael Ducy: DudeOps — Why The Big Lebowski is About your IT project
• Frank Breedijk: Help, my Security Officer doesn’t trust me
• Jonathan Weiss: Continuous Deployment and Integration in the Cloud

Which were great to listen to. In these talks I got confirmed what I alreadynknew and it gave me a bit more knowledge that I already had.

But what me surprised me the most where the Open Space discussions.

Now I followed 3 discussions.

1. Agile, how not to let your team become story point junkies;
2. Kanban or Scrum?
3. How can I convince my manager / management to invest into continuous integration and test driven development.

So, I was a bit of a strange guy on this DevOps days. I did not know but theynactually don’t expect Managers to come to this event. Sure you’re happy toncome and attend. But the Devs and IT’s don’t really expect you.

Now in my case it gets even stranger. As I come from a developer rolen(developer -> team lead -> manager) I know a lot about development, testing,nservers, software e.g.

So when I talked to these people they were quite surprised to hear that I wasna Manager. You saw them looking…. “a manager that actually understand whatnproblems we have?”, “a manager that actually is on the same level ofndevelopment / software / server knowledge?”, “a manager that actually isntelling us that we are right, and management is wrong?”.

Now, also during the talks I heard the following phrases a lot:

• I hope there are no Managers here!
• Managers don’t really understand us
• Managers are nothing but a Pain in the …..!
• Managers think only about production / deliver.

Well guys, guess what! I do understand you! And I’m not thinking aboutnproduction / and deliver on time.

So I talked to a lot of people about this during the day.

And I think that Managers should also attend the DevOpsDays. Even more I wouldnlike to get the yearly DevMansDays up and running!

I think that when Developers (and ITs) and Managers understood each othernbetter that the manager could and would actually help the Developers to makentheir lives easier and development better instead of getting in their way!

So who’s up for the challenge? And help me to get more managers to denDevOpsdays next year or… even better, help me to get DevMansDays on the road!

Just drop me a line to help me! [contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ntype=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’nrequired=’1’/][contact-field label=’Message’ type=’textarea’nrequired=’1’/][/contact-form] !

Oh yes… one more thing!

I learned a lot today and hope to learn more tomorrow, but one thing I want tonknow more about is Kanban. We’re doing scrum at the moment at the company Inwork but hearing more and more about kanban I think we’re better off usingnkanban.

I think every developer or IT professional should attend to this event. Itndoesn’t really matter if you are a PHP, ASP.NET, JAVA developer or a Linux ornWindows IT Professional things talked about and discussed about has got greatnvalue and lessons to learn in it.