The Mass Extinction of Manual Processes: A DevOps Success Story

Large organizations can be filled with manual processes, and many people feel they are stuck with them. Bill Roberts and James La Spada tell the story of how Capital One used DevOps culture and kanban principles to significantly increase the speed of feature delivery—while lowering risk. Their team took the name Meteor, inspired by the big one that took out the dinosaurs, because they wanted to cause the mass extinction of these manual processes. Work at Capital One was previously completed manually, and many inefficiencies were evident. Bill and James helped drive the transformation to a DevOps culture, and have seen improvements in time to market and quality through automation. Eliminating component teams and properly applying kanban principles have enabled Bill and James to teach teams the core principles needed to embrace DevOps. They can now manage their own adoption of DevOps in an effort to move the organization to full continuous integration and continuous delivery.