Agile at scale can get you to code very quickly, but then sometimes everything comes to a screeching halt.  The biggest bottlenecks are often found after teams are done with the code.  Dan James of Icon Agility Services joined Bob Payne on the Agile Toolkit Podcast to discuss Dan’s session at Lean+Agile DC 2018: Building a Lean Enterprise with DevOps.  Dan and Bob explore “shifting left,” creating a pipeline of smooth handoffs, and decoupling release from deployment.   TRANSCRIPT   Bob Payne: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm your host Bob Payne I'm here at Lean+Agile D.C. 2018 and I'm here with Dan James from Icon Agility or is that Icon Agility Services.  Dan James: [00:00:13] It's the whole name. Bob Payne:  [00:00:14] It's the whole name? Okay great. And your talk is on DevOps Transformation, scaling and and other things. Dan James: [00:00:24] Yeah, Extending the Lean Enterprise with DevOps.  Bob Payne: [00:00:27] Uh huh.What does that mean when you say that, Lean Enterprise?  Dan James: [00:00:31] Well we know that agile at scale can get you to code very quickly and it comes to a screeching halt because we have a wall of confusion - agile wants us to go fast. Business wants us to go fast. But the systems team wants stability right and reliability and security. And so you know our code comes to a screeching halt and may go into a black hole for weeks and months before it is finally releasable. And so what what we help enterprises do is work out the strategy and the tactics before we even talk about tools we get into the tactics and the strategy of creating a pipeline that smoothes out and leans out the handoffs yet to in order to get something delivered. And so we do a deep dive with our clients we go in and do a full technical assessment of of how they're delivering value now. And we show them that their biggest bottlenecks are usually after the agile teams are done with the code and and help them get releasable a lot sooner. Dan James: [00:01:35] And we give them strategies to protect their their product as they're developing it by having you know green blue strategies you know delivery you know being able to separate or decouple release from deployment so we can go to production every day. Right. But it may not be releasable until the business decides we have accumulated enough real value share and then that becomes a business decision. So by separating it also gives us more time to smoke test and do canary releases and other things to ensure that what we have put out there is is sound before we release it to the public. Bob Payne: [00:02:15] Yeah. So..feature Toggles those sorts of...  Dan James: [00:02:17] Exactly. And then we also teach the discipline of shifting left in the pipeline back to the teams. The responsibility for initial quality. Bob Payne: [00:02:26] Right.  [00:02:27] So we don't want to them to just throw their code over a wall and expect a testing team that had no input on the context of what they're building right to think of all the possible edge cases to test this stuff. And so so we instill in our assessment we uncover all the the practices that need to be fixed before we automate anything and making sure that initial quality I mean if if if you think you can deploy quickly but you're not unit testing your code then we have a big problem. Bob Payne: [00:02:58] Yep. Dan James: [00:02:58] You know the way that agile and scaled agile goes fast is by focusing on the quality. Bob Payne: [00:03:04] Yeah. Dan James: [00:03:04] And then we all go fast, And so that's that's the biggest thing. Bob Payne: [00:03:08] Okay. For me I actually I actually believe the. So if you can't get stuff out it doesn't matter what your strategy is. I believe a lot of that the last mile work will allow us to shift lefter because ultimately I think one of the big problems that most organizations face in any sort of real agility they can get the wrong thing out faster but real business agility would use to use that for learning and it would