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**Romano Roth:** Exactly. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So that's what this is. Okay, that makes sense. That was an interesting one. Now, I know that all the talks are available online, as videos, to catch up on-demand; again, I'll add the link in the show notes. I've also seen the pictures. So if you wanna see how this meetup was, you can go and look at t... |
I'm wondering - this is a yearly thing, right? So next year it's gonna happen again, also in-person, I'm imagining. |
**Romano Roth:** \[08:06\] Yeah, exactly. I think the next one will be on the 31st of May, and we will do it again in-person, and it will be again in Zurich, or in Winterthur, as we call it. In the same building. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. When do you open call for papers? When do people start submitting their talk proposals? |
**Romano Roth:** \[laughs\] Very good question. We don't know yet. We are currently closing off all of the stuff which we need to do for the pat conference... But my opinion, I think it will be perhaps around December or it will be January when we will open up the call for papers. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Are there any specific topics that you would like to see more of in the next DevOps Days conference? What do you call it - conference, summit? |
**Romano Roth:** Conference. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Conference. |
**Romano Roth:** Yeah... Don't come with Kubernetes... \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So no Kubernetes. |
**Romano Roth:** \[laughs\] We have so many proposals on Kubernetes, usually... No, what I really liked about the past conference, what we are focusing on, is diversity. And not only diversity like women or men, it's all about diversity also in different mindsets. That's why we also have different talks, and that's wha... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I love that. I mean, that really speaks to my heart, because we keep forgetting it's human beings, fallible, that get easily bored, and they keep chasing shiny, new things... And granted, Kubernetes may not be the shiny, new thing anymore, but then it's comfort, right? People are comfortable with that... |
Now, I know that you're into DevOps; like, big-time into DevOps. But I don't know why. Why are you into DevOps? |
**Romano Roth:** \[laughs\] Very good point. When I started my career, I was a .NET developer. And this was back in 2002, and we were doing there development of applications, or rich client applications. And one of the things also in the early times which struck me is "How can I ensure the quality of what I'm doing?" A... |
And when the whole DevOps movement started, I jumped on that, because this was really one of my hard topics, where I wanted to create these pipelines to continuously deal that value to the customer. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So my understanding is that you were passionate about how value gets delivered, which got you into DevOps, which seems to have made that almost like the center of its activity. How do you move this code from a repository into customer hands, wherever that may be? And there's like a whole lot of automa... |
**Romano Roth:** \[12:16\] The absolutely first CI/CD system was actually a command line that I used. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. |
**Romano Roth:** Yeah, definitely. But I think what you want to ask is more the first product that I used, and this was -- I think it was the Team Foundation Server. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So when you mentioned the command line, did you mean like Rsync, or FTP, or SCP? What exactly did you do on the command line? |
**Romano Roth:** Different things... For example, I had some scripts, command line scripts which I used to just compile or execute the tests. So my first build system was a batch file on my local computer, which I just could double-click and then it executed the tests. It compiled my code and it says "Yeah, everything ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. What about today? What do you use today? |
**Romano Roth:** Today I use quite a variety of systems. One of the products which I love is still TeamCity. I love that quite a lot, because you can do a lot of configuration. I use usually TeamCity together with Octopus Deploy, which I also love as a tool. But I see quite a strong movement in the moment into the dire... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's interesting. So I think that now we are starting to discover another side of Romano, because we know that you can put up a conference really well, as well as a meetup, but you also do other things. So when you don't organize various DevOps-related events, what do you do? Because you mentioned c... |
**Romano Roth:** Yeah. \[laughs\] I'm the head of DevOps at \[14:52\] and there I have a whole unit of DevOps engineers and DevOps consultants, and I bring DevOps forward at Zühlke. So there is one side at Zühlke - I do a lot of trainings of people in the direction of DevOps, so that we can deliver better quality, bett... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So how large is your team? |
**Romano Roth:** The team is roughly at the moment I think 31 people, at Zühlke. But this is only in Switzerland, of course; there are other people around the world which are also doing DevOps. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. So your team is 31 DevOps engineers that work with various customers that you consult, help with DevOps-related projects. How many projects do you have? |
**Romano Roth:** \[16:01\] Quite a lot, and the different people which are in my team, they work for different customers, and also with different engineers. So it is not only that these projects are under my responsibility, they are under different people's responsibility, but my team members are working in these proje... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So I'm thinking that you must have seen many projects this year that went well, as well as many projects that didn't go so well. Is this something that you can talk about, without giving any names? We don't have to give any names. But things that worked well, and things that didn't go so well. W... |
**Romano Roth:** Yeah, sure. When we think about things that went well, there is - especially at one customer, where we are creating a whole transformation... And what we did there is they are going through an Agile transformation. And one of the things you need to have for an Agile transformation is technical fundamen... |
From the beginning, we identified who the customer is, and we said "We want to deliver to this customer." And we said, "Okay. Everything what we are doing must be something that the customer can use." And we started with that. |
The thing was that in the first sprints which we did we saw that we were delivering to the customer, but only to the customer, but the customer was not using it. So we changed that, and we said, "No, no. From now on, the customer needs to use it", so we put that in the definition of Done that the customer needs to take... |
**Break:** \[19:16\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So when it comes to the biggest obstacles, the biggest challenges to driving DevOps transformation or successful DevOps projects, what are they? What did you come across in your experience, Romano? |
**Romano Roth:** So one of the biggest obstacles that is out there is actually the middle management. What you can see is you have a lot of companies which are organized in different units. And these units - they have goals. And of course, there is a head of this unit, and he has built that unit up, and he is chasing h... |
So now, with Agile transformation or with the DevOps transformation, you are starting to align the people around the value stream, and you bring people together. And this means that some of these heads of these units - they are losing power. And they know that, they see that, and this is something they don't want to ha... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So how do you succeed with that, bringing them on board? How does that even look like? |
**Romano Roth:** So one of the things you need to analyze is what are the goals these people have. And usually, it's not their goals, it's the goals of their bosses, and you need to change these goals. So when we look at an Agile transformation or a DevOps transformation, it is very crucial that it comes from the top m... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. And what about the type of person that doesn't want to change? What do you do then? |
**Romano Roth:** This is a very difficult case, when you have that. The only thing you can do in that case is try to educate, try to convince, but if you can't, he/she potentially needs to leave the company. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[24:02\] I see. Okay. So coming back to the Agile transformation or the DevOps transformation that you mentioned about - the first example that you gave us, of what good looks like in practice, is when you connect the value that the team builds, the customer(s) they build it for, and have the custome... |
**Romano Roth:** It's more. One of the most important things that I always say is what you usually have is you have bright ideas. The business has ideas, the customer has bright ideas... And usually, you have a lot of these ideas. And what you want to do is you want to transform these ideas into value - value for the c... |
So behind an idea, there is always a hypothesis, and you need to identify this hypothesis which is behind this idea. For example, a hypothesis can be when we bring this feature or this shiny, new mobile app, then we can have 10% more turnover. So that could be the hypothesis behind that. And now, the important thing is... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The way I understand that is ship less, more often, and check if it works. |
**Romano Roth:** True. Absolutely. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's how I'd summarize it. |
**Romano Roth:** Yeah, perfect. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And in that case, you want to optimize the shipping cycle as much as you can. If it takes a day, try to go for an hour. If it takes an hour, try to go for a minute... No, that doesn't work. I don't think you can ship it in a minute. Maybe if you have a function, maybe... The point being, go as quickly... |
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