TALK ABSTRACT

Scaling a DevOps transformation is one of the biggest problems enterprises faces as they seek to accelerate value delivery. Some teams focus on the culture and automation changes in silos or with limited collaboration. Other teams may not understand the value and continue to deliver at a cadence they have always found comfortable. Tool fragmentation, process fragmentation, misunderstandings of how CI works or what CD actually is are constant struggles. At Walmart, we are taking an integrated approach to address this.

• Community of interest: After a successful DevOps day, passionate developers formed a community to meet frequently and share what we are doing in each of our teams. As people ask questions, we point them to the community for answers. The core team of the community works closely with our delivery platform team to organize events and guide good processes.
  
• Common delivery platform: We are building, and will be sharing, a tool suite based on open source offerings upgraded to allow them to scale to Walmart’s needs. Our goal is to deliver tools that are easy to learn, hide much of the complexity and allow development teams to focus on products instead of solving the delivery problem.
  
• Gamified metrics: We have gamified CapitalOne’s Hygieia to incentivize the outcomes we want and we are explicit about how to win a good score. We currently have a single instance of Hygieia with over 6000 dashboards so far and summary screens that roll scores up to the CTO level. We are working closely with CapitalOne to make these changes available.
  
• Sherpa teams: Our Sherpas can help with cloud migration, resilient architecture, and continuous delivery processes. The CD Sherpas, Walmart’s implementation of Dojos, will embed in a team to help them use our tools effectively and assist with overcoming impediments to continuous delivery. They guide the team along the path and help them clear obstacles while teaching the goals.
  

This unified effort of community, tools, gamified goals, and guidance is helping to scale enterprise transformation in the world’s largest retailer.