using kanban and chef: a case study – jeffrey hulten

Are you the only one working on your Chef configuration? I was. Then within six weeks my client quadrupled the staff working with Chef. Okay, they just hired three people but that was still disruptive. We had to learn how to work together in the same repo. While I knew all the 'best practices' around testing and deploying cookbooks it wasn't as critical when I was the only one committing changes. Suddenly I needed a better plan. Implementing the community practices would only get me so far. I needed to help this team of diverse skill levels manage their work AND their Chef repository. I needed to highlight to my customer when we were processing interrupts at the expense of scheduled work. I needed to make sure the work was small enough that no one disappeared down a rabbit hole for days on end, but still met the needs of the rest of the organization. I needed Kanban. In this talk I will walk through my experiences, painful and glorious, building a team and managing their work. I will cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of a deadline crunched, pre-launch operations team and what we did to bring sanity, from discovering the real flow of work to documenting interruptions, and how we used (and misused) Chef throughout.