Puppet Insights arrives to shine uncomfortably bright light on DevOps

DevOps heavyweight Puppet took the opportunity afforded by its Puppetize Live shindig to fling out a new product to measure DevOps performance. Due to hit private beta in October, Puppet Insights aims to give a dashboard-like representation, familiar to sales and finance, of the DevOps performance of a business. This is no bad …

[jngreenlee]

When the near-sighted lead the blind...

[Flakk]

It is hard not draw a comparison to Clippy ("it looks like you guys really, really suck at DevOps. Have you considered going back to waterfall?")

[Doctor Syntax]

I'm reminded of a lesson I learned years ago.

There was a Software Tools exhibition at Olympia or the like. Being very new in the industry and enthused with all the AT&T stuff like Programmer's Workbench which was relatively recent I went along expecting to see all sorts of wonderful stuff to aid the developer. Nope. It was all stuff for management to measure developers and the like.

It was my first introduction to the fact that there were a lot of people who wanted to be "in computers" but didn't really want to do hard stuff like cut code. I encountered a lot of them as time went on. Provided I could avoid as many as possible it was still a fun 20 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Similarly Scrum, Jira etc are all billed as helping developers while really only benefiting managers who don’t know how to manage

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 90's I realised that the IT world was suddenly awash with MSCE certified bods who had no idea who to even recover and boot a failed WinNT system or learning the fledgling Linux, that's when the penny dropped.

When I was at school in the 80's there was a dedicated crowd of about 5 guys that I hung around with, we all loved computers, we programmed we learned all we could, shared our knowledge with each other but everyone thought we were just completely sad. Come the late 90's and I reckon as many as 20% of those who called us names were by then "working in IT" 'cos Mum and Dad told them it's where the money is. Some of us knew that and put the prep work in while still at school and it paid off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately while those of us with a technical interest remained on the "shop floor", those "Computeach" newcomers got themselves MBAs and now manage us.

In other words, they're driving the sports cars in amongst our hatchbacks in the car park.

[Anonymous Coward]

Goodhart's Law

> However, what is new is the Scoring approach, where Insights assigns a credit score-like rating to Velocity and Quality.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you Goodhart's Law

[Julz]

Re: Goodhart's Law

@ 2+2=5

Have a few more up votes +1 +1 +1 +1

The basis of human behavior that Goodhart's law encapsulates is both profound and seemingly beyond the wit of anyone who gets into a position of power and influence. Thus we have a blossoming of inappropriate targets and measures in all walks of life, none of which produce the results that their originators where hoping for.

I guess you could also say that it's kind of a way of turning correlation into causation but not in the way that you might have expected.

Mines the one with all of the school league tables in the pockets...