Devops' Seven Deadly Diseases
summary
Argues that seven organizational diseases (Invisible Work, Management System Toil, Tribal Knowledge, Misalignment of Incentives, Incongruent Organizational Design, Misunderstanding Complexity, Security and Compliance Theater) hide in plain sight and proposes organizational forensics—rapid interviews (about 25–30 leaders), team walks (dev team Monday, another Tuesday), flipchart work to reveal that many orgs capture 40% of work, surface surprises like engineers having memory/disk quotas routinely halved, use Wardley maps and value‑stream thinking, and pilot distributed ledger provenance (Graffia) to cut audit time dramatically.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction to DevOps history
- 1:25DevOps as organizational transformation
- 3:57Finding truth in legacy organizations
- 8:15Organizational forensics approach
- 12:32First deadly disease: Measuring work
- 17:38Dark debt and downstream dependencies
- 20:10Second deadly disease: Unknown work
- 21:40Third deadly disease: Multiple work systems
- 22:44Fourth deadly disease: Misalignment of centers
- 24:11Fifth deadly disease: Institutional knowledge
- 25:56Sixth deadly disease: Organizational design
- 27:43Conway's law and tribal knowledge
- 28:49Seventh deadly disease: Complexity and blame
- 30:15Abraham Wald and psychological safety
- 30:37Attestation and audit automation
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