Two great interviews I found today and enjoyed very much, between Donovan Brown and Aaron Bjork (who is head of the DevOps part of VSTS).

From the first video:

• We treat our development teams as adults – “I’ll trust you until you give me reason not to.”
• How does Microsoft structure their product teams?
• How do we keep to a consistent UI? i.e. checkboxes versus radio buttons – what design guidelines do we use?
• How to tie together 50 teams with one weekly meeting of six people
• How big of an advantage it is to dogfood it – be your own first customer.
• “Our engineers write code, test code, and deploy code.”
• Feature flags – we don’t use these for just one customer. The boundary to turn on the flag is during the current sprint, and then turn off the following sprint.

Second video notes:

• (minutes into program) 1:27 – Why 3 week sprints? Goldilocks principle. Donovan mentions a physician product owner where 4 weeks was the best he could get.
• 5:46 – Dogfooding, and customer driven features.
• 13:09 – We used to have all these plans that helped me sleep at night – but did we ever ship on time? (i.e. waterfall and requirements planning as a security blanket)
• 16:32 – importance of monitoring. DevOps is not automation. Most of their DevOps discussions end with Agile.
• 19:03 – distrust between Dev and Ops. The chasm grows. Now we are improving with TDD, unit testing – but the distrust is still there.
• 20:27 – treat your deployment pipeline as a feature of your product.
• 27:54 – Do we deliver mid-sprint at Msft?
• 32:57 – “You can’t cheat shipping.” Scenarios, features, stories and tasks.
• 39:10 – Feature flag litter and documentation.