We are just back from the Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps Transformation Summit and, from what we can tell it more than lived up to its promotion. For three days, software development and delivery professionals availed themselves of talks, educational sessions, vendor information and networking in the beautiful Bay Area. It’s our understanding that this was the first time Electric Cloud hosted an industry summit, but the attendees seemed very satisfied. At least half of the sessions used case studies to educate attendees on lean principles, the speakers were diverse and the legendary Gene Kim hosted the event, providing the keynote and bringing a large following of Development and Operations professionals with him.
Kim is obviously a huge draw, and contributed substantially to the success of the summit, but the attendees really made the summit from our point-of-view. This was a crowd seriously focused on making DevOps work, solving DevOps problems and basically learning as much as they could about what kinds of tools and methodologies other organizations were employing to realize success with Agile and continuous delivery. They ate, slept and talked lean and achieving interoperability. This kind of crowd makes it fun for Tasktop. There were lots of serious questions from people meeting difficult challenges.
These are exactly the kind of conversations we like to be part of. We’re always happy to talk about planning, tools, collaboration, testing, process the whole spectrum of the lifecycle. After talking to lots of people the observation that DevOps has become more of a state-of-mind than a series of actions or achievements was reinforced to us. It’s a way of thinking about the hard work of software delivery.
There were lots of conversations about the need for all of the disciplines involved in the software delivery process, people and the tools, to work together more easily and closely. They were singing our song. And it wasn’t 100% work. An interesting and fun trip to The Computer Museum added some perspective to the event. It’s hard to imagine that technology has come so far in a few decades. It seems like a long time for those of us who have been in the industry for a while, but it’s a speck on the time continuum. It’s also amazing (and a good thing) how much computer design has evolved. Those machines were as ugly as they were groundbreaking.
 |  |
We hear that there were hundreds of people on the waiting list once the event reached capacity, so we feel pretty confident that you’ll be seeing this event again next year. In the meantime, we look forward to continuing the conversations with the people we met at the summit.
