The Three Ways - key principles of DevOps (2024)

The Three Ways (three principles underpin what DevOps is about, originally developed by Gene Kim in 'Phoenix Project' book) = Flow + Feedback + Continuous experimentation and learning.

Source: Gene Kim, 'The Three Ways: The Principles Underpinning DevOps"

DevOps practitioners believe an organisation can produce high quality software products and services and shorten time to market by adapting the The Three Ways described below.

The 1st Way: Flow

The First Way of DevOps emphasizes on Systems Thinking, optimising the business process, streamlining it, making it more reliable. This is an understanding and increasing the flow of work (Dev --> Ops or Business --> Customer), removing constraints and emphasizing the performance of the end-to-end process, as opposed to the performance of a specific silo of work or department. Sounds like Lean to me...

Practices here should include:

• Continuous Integration,
• Continuous Delivery,
• Continuous Deployment,
• Value Stream Mapping (VSM),
• Kanban,
• Theory of Constraints (TOC).

The 2nd Way: Feedback

The Second Way of DevOps is about understanding and responding to the needs of all customers and stakeholders; shortening and amplifying all feedback loops ('fail fast'), so a corrective actions can be taken as early in the process as possible.

Practices here should include:

• Automated testing,
• Peer review of production changes,
• Monitoring and notification practices,
• ‘At a glance’ dashboards and status updates,
• Production logs,
• Process measurements,
• Post-mortems,
• Shared on-call rotation,
• Change, Incident, Problem and Knowledge Management data (create and embed knowledge where needed).

The 3rd Way: Continuous experimentation and learning

Last but not least - creating a culture change that fosters:

1. Continual experimentation, taking risks and learning from failure,
2. Understanding that repetition and practice is a prerequisite of mastery and a road to perfection.

What does it mean in practice? Allocating time for daily work improvement, creating rituals that reward the team (not individuals) for taking risks, introducing faults into the system to increase resilience (Monkey Chaos), planning time for safe experimentation and innovation (hackathons), migrating managers toward a role of coach and mentor, sharing knowledge and making the results of learning visible.

Practices here should include:

• Experimentation and learning,
• PDCA (Deming Cycle),
• Improvement Kata.

The Three Ways are not about technology. This is all about a better way to deliver business value at a faster rate. This is about attitude, behaviour, and culture (ABC of ICT).