For this week’s Digital Influencer column I interviewed Jez Humble, who burst onto the DevOps scene in 2010 with his award-winning book, Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, coauthored with David Farley.
This book proved instrumental for putting DevOps on the map for enterprises, and simultaneously catapulted Humble into the tech cred stratosphere. What led him to write such an influential book, and what is he up to next?
The Horror of the ‘Big Hairy Enterprise’
After completing a degree in Physics and Philosophy at Oxford University in 2000, Humble dove right into a dot-com startup – just as the dot-com crash was getting underway.
This experience gave him his first taste of what continuous delivery of software might be like. “I deployed from my computer straight into production,” Humble says of his time at the startup – a practice considered too dangerous for most organizations at the time.
By 2004 he had joined ThoughtWorks, a software development consultancy known for its thought leadership among the software cognoscenti. It exposed Humble to its enterprise customers – an eye-opening experience for him.
At ThoughtWorks he worked on several agile projects in the role of programmer and team lead, taught agile software development for the company’s internal training program, and consulted for large companies on implementing agile processes and continuous delivery.
However, he quickly became disillusioned. “I was horrified how hard it was to build production-like environments,” Humble recalls. “We couldn’t get it to work. That’s normal for the enterprise. It’s just how they did things.”
Humble found traditional approaches to project management particularly horrific. “Project management in the waterfall style is a miserable experience for everyone, but that’s how we’ve always done things,” Humble says. “I didn’t want to see people miserable.”
His years of effort at ThoughtWorks, attempting to help what he calls the “big hairy enterprises” develop software properly, led to an approach that was radical at the time. “A bunch of folks at ThoughtWorks put together a strategy to get rid of painful, weekend-long releases altogether.”
His work hammering out the details of this strategy led him to co-author the Continuous Delivery book, which was published in 2010.
He had no inkling the book would become a bestseller. “We set out to write a boring niche book,” Humble claims. However, his timing was perfect for riding the DevOps wave, “which we didn’t predict at all.”
Riding the DevOps Wave
Next up for Humble: joining DevOps-centric vendor Chef Software in 2014. At Chef he was one of a cadre of DevOps thought leaders (see my 2015 interview of Chef founder and CTO Adam Jacob).
While at Chef, Humble penned his next book, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale, with Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly, which they published in 2015. However, after spending so many years at a consulting company, the work at Chef didn’t fit with his career goals. “Chef is doing some very interesting things,” Humble, explains, “but it was not a good fit with what I wanted to do.”
It was one thing to put down his hard-fought best practices into book form – but quite another to bring them to large organizations. “Not just the Amazons and Facebooks, but also banks and other ‘big hairy enterprises’,” Humble laments. “It’s depressing. Lots of people in industry don’t do it this way.”
How, then, to impact the software development status quo getting in the way at so many enterprises? “I want to indoctrinate the youth,” Humble says – leading to an instructor role at the University of California at Berkeley.
When he joined the UC Berkeley faculty, however, he found the students ill-prepared to bring the DevOps way of doing things to the companies they would soon work for. “At UC Berkeley, there were all these people out of college not knowing how to do this stuff,” he explains.
To address this problem, Humble put together an entirely new curriculum in product management. “I helped to develop the curriculum with a course on ‘lean agile product management,’” he explains. “My approach to product management is a constant experimental approach, not a big list of requirements. Assumptions about what users want are usually wrong.”
In other words, he emphasizes the iterative, customer-focused approach familiar from Agile, while bringing it to the discipline of product management – what he calls “applying Lean Startup principles to big hairy enterprises.”
Fortunately, he finds a receptive audience at UC Berkeley. “I teach in the graduate school,” Humble says. “People are incredibly smart and passionate, and want to change the world.”
Good Enough for Government Work
In January 2016, Humble joined 18F, a skunkworks-like team of designers, developers, and product specialists inside the US General Services Administration, an independent agency of the US Federal Government. He serves as Deputy Director of Delivery Architecture and Infrastructure Services at 18F.
Working for the US Government might seem like a strange move, especially for a Brit who cut his teeth at the King Edward’s School, Bath, in Somerset, England. However, 18F’s mission to transform government from the inside out (according to their web site), combined with a refreshing distance from the Bay Area, proved to be a good combination for Humble. “In the Bay Area, it’s easy to get lost with companies who are building the next ‘Uber for trees,’” he quips.
In fact, public service aligns well with his career goals. “Battling technology inertia is in everything we do. It pervades every aspect of our life,” he explains, referring to working within the government in general. “The Lean, [DevOps] way to do software development will make people happier and serve the general public as well.”
Next up for Humble: the release of his forthcoming book, The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations, coauthored with fellow DevOps thought leaders Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, and John Willis, due in October 2016.
Humble is happy to provide a sneak preview. “We’re codifying DevOps and putting it in a book,” he says. “We have a bunch of good practices that cover the whole gamut from development to monitoring to culture.”
He’s quick to point out, however, that the book won’t solve every problem companies are facing as they roll out DevOps. “We don’t claim we have definitive answers,” he says. But if it will help big hairy enterprises become not quite so hairy, reading the book will be time well spent.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Chef Software is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Rani Sanghera.
