Friday 20 November 2015

ABCDE....DevOps and Privacy, pt 2

Earlier I introduced the idea that DevOps, particularly in the area of privacy could take lessons from trauma medicine, particularly in taking on board ideas from ATLS.

This led to some further ideas about the relationships or analogies between disciplines - something we've already discussed before in the context of surgery, aviation and checklists.

As software engineering is being brought closer and closer to the metaphorical coal-face - we've moved away from requirements up-front to agile and now to "DevOps" where engineering and operations become the same thing we are starting to see the need to move to much more structured and disciplined teams of engineers. If this isn't happening then there are some serious cultural and management problems.

As this shift happens we have to develop techniques to deal with this - as already mentioned checklists and ATLS provide the necessary kind of structures.

By why ATLS in particular? Well, we can draw an analogy between DevOps and trauma medicine in that DevOps operates with extremely short time-scales and in an environment where fixes and patches need to be very quick and leave the system in a stable state where a longer-term patch can be made later.

DevOps is the ER of the software engineering world.

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