Patrick Debois, who organised the first DevOpsDays in 2009 and is now an independent advisor and Product DevRel Lead at Tessl, joins Benedikt Stemmildt to look at software factories and dark factories through a DevOps lens.
Most factories automate the same loop of writing, reviewing and deploying code. Patrick argues that the harder question is when a change can reach customers without a human reviewing it, and that this is a question of risk rather than of code. From there, he explains why he turns whatever he can into deterministic checks, why a factory should explore as well as build, and how factories change the size of teams, the roles inside them and the way organisations share what they build.
In this episode:
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:16 Software Factories Through a DevOps Lens
04:13 Risk Is the Real Merge Decision
06:52 Not Every Part of the Code Carries the Same Risk
11:15 Dark Factories Come in Gradations
12:23 Deterministic and Non-Deterministic Checks
14:06 Orchestrators vs. State Machines
17:04 Local Iteration vs. Autonomous Factories
19:12 Research Loops and the Dream Factory
21:32 Pipelines Beyond Code
22:46 Smaller Teams, Fused Roles
26:24 Solo Developers and the Bus Factor
28:29 System Thinkers and Chaos Engineers
31:40 Factories as Platforms
34:57 Model Upgrades Are Major Upgrades
37:36 What Happens to Juniors?
44:19 How Companies Should Start
46:23 Two Metrics: Human Touches and Reuse
47:52 From Solo to Multiplayer Factories
49:39 Deploying Skills, Installing Loops
51:10 Patrick's Advice
52:38 Wrap-Up
Mentioned in this episode:
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