Is the SAFe DevOps Certification For Me? - DevOps - The Radar

 Finally, on to content. This graphic is SAI’s DevOps Health Radar, used here with permission. Course attendees will become very familiar with this, as it forms the basis for the course content. Starting in the upper right and continuing clockwise there are four major domains: Explore, Integrate, Deploy and Release. Each domain has several subdomains within it that all form a repeating cycle of DevOps improvement.

Note that this cycle encompasses all three ways of work that both the DevOps Handbook and the Phoenix Project talk about:

• The First Way: The Principles of Flow is housed in the Integrate, Deploy and Release quadrants of the radar.
• The Second Way: The Principles of Feedback is mostly contained in both the Deploy and Release quadrants.
• The Third Way: The Principles of Continual Learning primarily live in the Explore and Release segments.

Those of you who are familiar with SAFe will also recognize the four components of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline that SAFe talks about. These are: Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and Release on Demand. Since each of these is such a critical part of any agile implementation, its nice to see each topic get so much attention.

This radar is used throughout the course to help practitioners understand how to guide and move their organizations toward the center of the radar, where Alignment, Quality, Time to Market and Business Value all live. The courseware falls out into segments based on the four major domains with sub-chapters talking about the sixteen sub-domains. This course is very strong on class participation and group-learning activities, ala Training From the Back of the Room, by Sharon Bowman.

There is one more major piece of content, in my opinion. Class attendees will be shown a telemetry-based method for digging into their entire delivery pipeline and easily identifying the parts of it that would offer the best opportunities for improvement. Even if you aren’t sure what your pipeline is, the class will cover methods for defining it. Once you have it mapped, you will apply metrics and make a decision on which part to improve first, then start at 12:00 on the radar with Hypothesize, proceeding through each quadrant until you come back around to the top. When you are back there you will keep on cycling through the process.