The Five Ways of Devops

I think there are not Three Ways of Devops but five Ways.

The novel The Phoenix Project was intended to be a way of selling and educating us on the concept of Agile, Lean and DevOps, but it is such a brilliant book that it created a new model of its own along the way, known as the Three Ways.

The Three Ways is a mystical model taught to the hero of the book by the Zen-like Eric who turns up at appropriate moments to guide him forward.

The First Way is acceleration of flow from left to right, from input to output.
The Second Way is feedback from right to left.
And the third way is continuous experimentation and mastery.

But wait, that's two things. Continuous experimentation is PDCA, doing different things in many small steps. Mastery is Kata, repeating the same thing over and over. They're entitled different things.

So, strictly speaking, the Third Way is actually two ways: iteration and repetition. I call them 3a and 3b :)

I think there also a Fourth (or Fifth) Way: Shift Left, move work - especially assurance - earlier in the flow, and bake it in. This is as fundamental for altering the flow as the other four ways.

So, in the unlikely event that I ever wrote anything as good as The Phoenix Project, I'd have Five Ways.

My review of the Phoenix Project

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