Our team stand-ups are as I think all stand-ups should be, simply talking openly and sensibly. We always chat about food, which makes me hungry even though I have just had breakfast!
Our department records its targets in the form of “Objectives and key results”, or OKRs. I have never used this way of working before, but I will do a blog post ASAP. We have been recording our OKRs in a standard format for a few months now, and it is working brilliantly. We’re even tagging our tickets with the OKR references so that we can more easily track the key result of an Objective.
Our team strives to simplify the infrastructure, enabling Engineers of all disciplines to understand what is happening when they deploy applications. I see this as doing “good DevOps”, something I am always trying to achieve.
However, not all our infrastructure is as simple as it could be. We’re seeing more issues arise due to the complexities of our system that have ended up deployed over the years. The problem is Engineers leave from all areas of the business, as is to be expected. However, documentation is light due to our fast-paced culture, so a significant amount of knowledge loss occurs. Our team is on the sharp end of this knowledge loss, so we’re going overboard now to ensure this doesn’t continue to happen again. This loss is most apparent when I have been helping a team migrate an app from one namespace to another within Kubernetes. A simple task, one may think - THINK AGAIN! However, traversing this pain has allowed me to hone our new designs to ensure we’re Engineering systems that are as simple as possible.
In summary:
- Funny stand-ups;
- OKR and ticket planning;
- Fixed many AWS issues.