Gemba

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Where Did Gemba Come From?
It is a Japanese term which means “the real place”. The Japanese detectives are calling the crime scene as gemba and the Japanese television reporters will refer themselves reporting from the gemba. In the world of business, it refers to a place where the value’s created; in the manufacturing, it is the floor of the factory. In addition, it may refer to any site like construction site, floor of the sales or from where the provider of the service directly interacts with the consumers.
Gemba and its Examples
 In the lean manufacturing, gemba’s idea is that problems are visible and the best ideas will come from going to it gemba. Gemba walk, is like MWBA or Management By Waking Around, is an activity that able to take the management to the front line to seek for opportunities and waste to practice the gemba keizen, or practical improvement of shop floor.

 While in the quality management, it means the manufacturing floor and its idea is when the problem occurs, the engineers are required to go there and comprehend the problems full impact and get information from the sources available. Different from surveys and focused groups, gemba visit is not bound or scripted by what one would want to ask.
Glenn Mazur had introduced this term QFD or Quality Function Deployment (the quality system for the new products where the manufacturing never start yet) to mean the business or lifestyle place of the customers. The idea is to be customer driven, a person must got to customer’s gemba to help understand the opportunities and problems with the use of own senses to collect and process the data.
Gemba walk implies the action of walking to see the process in actual mode, ask questions, understand the works, and able to learn from it. It is also one of the fundamentals of the philosophy of lean management. Taiichi Ohno, the Toyota executive, lead the concept development of gemba walk. It is an opportunity for the staff to make a stand back on their day-to-day works to walk in the floor of their working place to see some wasteful activities happen around.
The term used “going to the gemba” is more to be like a Japanese terminology “genchi gembutsu” perceived to compare to the term “management by walking around”. The method is manifesting a more resemblance to the motions and time studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor, even more recent on contextual design and contextual inquiry methods, which based in the context-specific learning of the work practices, enables to produce a design-relevant product insights and process.

— Slimane Zouggari

Andon

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What is Andon?
In English terminologies, andon means “signal” or “sign” and it is a visual aid alerting and highlighting the required action. Just for example, a signal light is lighting in the manufacturing plant, implying that the line had been stopped by the operator or supervising staff due to some malfunctions and problems. It is also a principle and a typical tool to apply in the jidoka principle in the lean manufacturing- Jidoka also referred as autonomation that mean highlighting the problem that occurs and introduce an immediate countermeasure to top the problem occurrence.
At the Toyota, the andon principle is differently applied than how a person might see it in the manufacturing.
Where Andon Come From?
Andons’ word origin come from the word for paper lantern- a common Japanese ornament. At the bottom, it is the terminology used to refer an illuminated signal that notifies other problem within the production stream or quality-control. It is usually activated by a button or pull-chord, which able to automatically halt the production so that team can gather and apply the PDCS and the root cause analysis, then effectively and quickly apply a corresponding solution.
The warning light is incorporated to an easily visible and overhead signboard that can also identify the specific workstation or area where the problem had occurred. The nature and frequency if the occasional problems are being analyzed being a part of the Toyota program for the continual improvement and development. The andon principles need to be applied for any specific situation. The concept of the andon principle will look differently if you are not in the manufacturing industry. For example, the amazon applies andon in their customer service in such a way it makes sense.
Remember: It’s a method used to stop the process and allow the team to apply a root cause analysis and implement as countermeasure to the issue arise. Doing it is to prevent the process to continue produce damage to the defective parts.
Examples of Andon
The following are the examples of andon:
 Signal lights
 Production board
 Flags and audio
Andon Signals and Board Components
The andon signals and board components may vary from the process to another process and applications for the andon system seems to be countless, generally be used to communicate the information to production plant just like the following:
 Product line status: produced, stooped, idled or overload
 Product settings like temperatures, weights, pressures, electricity, speeds, gas consumption, etc.
 Workstation status
 Different production goals or KPI’s such as planned production
 Production volume, product produced and WPI
 Call signs for the managers and supervisors to the certain area
 Different times: downtime, current time, running period time
The Japanese manufacturers of auto and other organization that implemented ancon system in their process of production have seen it to be very useful because if the factors it contributed to the company cultures and also because of its efficiency and initiatives in lean manufacturing.

— Slimane Zouggari

When is Devops Not Adequate ?

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Jez Humble clearly explained and identified DevOps as a cross-disciplinary community of practice and is dedicated to the study of evolving, building and operating changing and rapid resilient systems at a scale. This may already be a good definition but this may be specific and esoteric to internet-based startup types.
For those companies and businesses that practice DevOps, they have reported some of the significant benefits such as an enhanced customer satisfaction, shorter time-to-market, better quality product, improved productivity, reliable releases, efficiency and more. Apart from it, they also have built the right and the best product through fast experimentation.
And since DevOps means a cultural collaboration and shift between operations and development, there is really no unique tool or toolchain that consist of multiple tools. DevOps tools can also exactly fit into 1 or more categories of code, build, test, package, release, configure and monitor.
Even though there are tools available in the market, others still attempt of identifying the basic tools right through the existing literature. Tools like Puppet, Jenkins, Docker, Vagrant and more are frequently referenced and used in the tooling discussions of DevOps.
When Devops is Not Really Adequate?
Devops is such a good movement and a good practice but this is not adequate enough when there is a lack of clarity that leads to confusion. It is also believed that it encompasses the mindset of enhancing the efficiency of information technology processes that helps businesses in meeting their main objectives of market share, profit and more. All teams will have to be brought together in such an IT function like development, operations, security and QA. They will be enforced to work together and share their plans. They will also help one another and will automate the process of an increased efficiency.
But, as mentioned, the lack of clarity could mean that DevOps is not adequate enough. This will also not be effectively done when IT is not well respected or well funded, like in marketing or sales. Thus, there is a need for it to be implemented by the business leaders. They must further realize how information technology can help them in meeting their essential business objectives. This way, a company can invest more in IT.
DevOps is such a mindset when looking at the companies’ transformation and correlation to the tech-focused numbers. Actually, this is the reason why a lot of startups today post their technology bloom. They also introduced a product that is based on technology like web applications, Saas solutions and mobile applications.
DevOps may not be adequate enough when the money has been invested in the best sales people. But, companies or firms have not exactly realized the consistent IT flaws like product failures and website crashes that only lead to loss in sales.
Before doing the automation of an infrastructure, there should be a real change in the business. People should accept the fact of working together in achieving goals. This way, they will not feel and consider themselves as a detached function.

— Slimane Zouggari

Why is Devops so popular?

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Why Devops is now Hitting the Mainstream and Becoming More Popular ?
Devops, the compound acronym for “development” and operations is now becoming increasingly popular. This has become a famous practice among IT professionals and software developers. Devops differs from the old working landscape through emphasizing the significance of communication, cross-departmental collaboration and team based collaboration.
The reasons why Devops is now hitting the mainstream and becoming more popular are as follows:
 Greater security
 Increase market speed
 Increased conversions
 Customer satisfaction
 Environment stability
 Time availability
 Continuous software delivery.
Devops is also viewed as a movement, culture or practice which emphasizes communication and collaboration of Information Technology or IT experts and software developers while both automates software delivery process as well as infrastructure changes. Devops aims to establish environment and culture where testing, building and releasing software can happen frequently, rapidly and can take place more rapidly.
Devops is said to be the combination of tasks carried out by a particular company’s system operations and application development. This term is now being used in many different ways. Devops broadest meaning is defined as the philosophy promoting better communication between development and operation as more essential elements of operations turn out to be programmable.
In its narrow meaning, Devops describes a part of the IT team of a certain organization which creates then maintains infrastructure. This term can also be used to describe team of software engineers strategically looking for complete chain of software delivery overseeing the shared services and mastering the utilization of best practices and development tools.
The Different Sub-Concepts of this Ever Popular Devops
Devops is now becoming a buzzword and many organizations and individuals are talking about it. Devops is not really a tool, innovative framework or technology. This is more of concepts and philosophy. Devops is composed of two emerging words; development and operations.
Devops is known to include different sub-concepts like:
• Continuous Integration
This is more about the culture of incorporating source code or application code to source code repositories. Build tools are utilized to verify check in through integrating the source code repositories and continuous tools for integration.
• Continuous Testing
Unit testing or automated testing is used for such type of automated testing and these reliable tools are properly integrated in continuous integration behavior via tools.
• Cloud Provisioning or Continuous Provisioning
Cloud instance or virtual machines are flexible and highly available with pay per use feature. It is also ultimately beneficial to make different forms of instances for diverse environments such as staging, production, testing and development.
• Configuration Management
This concept is also useful especially in terms of making runtime environment entirely ready in more consistent manner all across all environments. There are configuration management tools that can be used to easily manage given resources.
• Continuous Deployment or Delivery
Continuous deployment or continuous delivery is a term commonly use day by day. Continuous delivery is being used when the package file is deployment ready to any environment while continuous deployment on the other hand is the term used when the package file is production-deployment ready.
Many companies and individuals are now using Devops for varied reasons. Those that practice Devops have reported amazing benefits which include significantly short market time, greater product quality, more improved client satisfaction, reliable releases, efficiency and more. The benefits also include building the right products through fast experimentations. Though individuals and companies have different stands and personal views about Devops, no one can deny the unique sets of benefits it brings.

— Slimane Zouggari

History of DevOps: When Did It Appear?

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People around the world have been confused of the term DevOps. As per the movement of DevOps, this is actually pervasive and is astonishing for the reason that it is only a few years old. But it turned out to be a form that is a fundamental based and a need on a simple way of life. And, this is the main reason why it turned out and had gradually grown.
The DevOps appeared from an exertion by businesses to be able to answer to the changes in the market. The fresh approach was purposely designed to assure the quality that is high updated software’s to get to the users quickly.
2007
While accessing on the information and the data epicenter migration for the government of Belgium, the system administration, and a software developer, Patrick Debois have been frustrated with the conflicts between the operations and developers. He contemplates solutions.
2008
Patrick Debois, a software developer, helps the plantation of the seeds of the DevOps undertaking at the Agile Conference that was in Toronto. He thought that there must be a great and best way in resolving the conflict between the operation teams and the software developers. Patrick Debois soon become the influential DevOps leader and the one that inspired other people to take the challenge.
2009
Two of the employees of the Flickr, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, made the case that the to test, build and deploy responsive fresh software. This is also to make the operations and development integrated and transparent.
2010
This is where the first ever US DevOps’ days were organized. In fact, this was simply carried out with the help of Willis along with the early proponents of DevOps. The event soon became a global series of conferences that are community organized and is the major force that is driving forward the DevOps Community.
2011
The community of DevOps starts to make an open tool source like the Vagrant that works with the existing configuration organization tools like the Chef and the Puppet.
2012
The presentation development segment has grown rapidly. It also became focused on the innovativeness. There were now various DevOps these days that suddenly pop around in some countries. It has also become the most attended event types in the world that lets them check in the latest innovative and smart thinking in the world of DevOps.
2014
The holder of brands such as the Lego and Nordstrom embraces the movement of the DevOps.
DevOps promises to continue impacting businesses, either a big or small business. In the next five years, DevOps will be embraced in the whole world and by those people who are engaged in the business. Small, big and private type of businesses can really benefit more from relying on DevOps. And for sure, this can bring out the best results in the long run for any business and for its success! For sure, as a business owner, you would love to consider this!

— Slimane Zouggari

Understanding DevOps Better

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DevOps is a movement that is composed of people who think that it is about time for change in the information technology industry. This is mainly about putting a stop to wasting money and starting delivering great software. In addition, it also about seeking to build systems that lasts.
How Does it Help?
There is a need to face the fact that the IT industry and the software industry suck. Even projects usually run late and as they are delivered, they will have nothing to do with investment. Some people even wonder why they have a job at all.
The good thing about DevOps is that it is built around a lot of people who firmly are a believer of it as a combination of attitude and appropriate technology. Through these elements, these can help revolutionize the software delivery and development.
As per the demographic, it is composed of talented and experienced thirty-something sysadmin coders having a clear understanding of writing a software. This is entirely about shipping product and making money. They also have mainly understood the key essential of being on the same side.
All people, testers, developers, network technicians, managers, sysadmins and DBA’s are trying to achieve one thing. This is mainly about the delivery of reliable and quality software that brings benefits to a specific business.
In this movement, it also highly emphasizes that there is no such IT skill that is more powerful or more useful than the other. To be able to resolve the problems, you might as well need all essential skills. When you are building teams that involve people such as sysadmins, testers and developers, you are also building remarkable teams.
Apart from this multi-disciplinary approach, the movement attempts to further encourage the continuous development of communication skills. It also seeks to understand the domain wherein the software is being written. It also promotes passion and sensitivity for an underlying business. This way, it ensures that it succeeds.
Among all these, communication is still one of the biggest players. As such, Devops are among the bridge-builders and are characterized due to their multidisciplinary skill set. They are those people who find themselves comfortable with configuration and infrastructure. They are also happy to write tests, roll up their sleeves, ship and debug features.
Apart from it, they are those people who make connections as they have feet in their multiple camps. They can also be peace makers, communicators, facilitators and ambassadors. The main point of the DevOps movement is to assess and encourage them further. This way, they can compare ideas and begin training, recruiting, identifying the way of doing IT.
It is expected that this movement will have its positive and impactful effect on the bottom line- such as better availability and reliability. More fulfilled and happier clients will be achieved in the long run. Thus, the team can focus more of their energies on core business than just wasteful firefighting and administration.
If you feel like you are wary of the movement, never worry anymore because as long you have the desire to change, you can hop in and join them!

— Slimane Zouggari

The Benefits of DevOps

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DevOps means many dissimilar things to different kinds of people for the reason of the argument around it refuges broad scope. DevOps carries immense benefits and advantages, especially to the IT Operations, Development and the Business. DevOps has the ability of helping the relationship among the Operations and the development, also the relationship among the business and IT, so does the relationship among the employees, customers and the company. Here are some of the benefits of the DevOps:
1. Shorter cycle of development- the DevOps stimulates an ethos of greater than before communication and collaboration amongst the operation and the development groups. This interprets into a timeframe that is shorter to change from the code of engineering into the executable manufacture code.
2. Increased release velocity- The diminutive development phase in turn constructs enlarged frequency for discharge of code into the production (this is also known as bid onboarding). This nurtures an uninterrupted deployment and development, consequently growing the worth of the IT (information technology) to the business. Improved discharge velocity also delivers companies that positively manage DevOps a reasonable advantage in line for their promptness to market structures that their clienteles need.
3. Improved defect detection- The DevOps constructs in the best position of the agile programming organization and, in a common sense, it can be deliberated as an outspreading agile programming. This commends to numerous agile philosophies such as the iterative development, modular programming, collaboration, and transgression of bigger codebases into a smaller untroublesome features. This will make it easier to distinguish the defects on the code.
4. Reduced deployment failures and the rollbacks- The advantages and the benefits gained as of faster deployment and development can be invalidated by unsuccessful deployment. Nevertheless, software when industrialized by means of the DevOps conviction takes into explanation a functioning vantage point as well. This, as soon as it is united with better-quality defect recognition, meaningfully dominates the amount of the pre- and post-deployment matters and consequently less rollbacks.
5. Reduce time of recovery- when there is a failure that occurs, the time of recovery to the operational efficiency is reduced by means of the DevOps compared to the environment to IT (information technology). This is due to the productivities that is extended by the development group affiliates indulgent on how operations team works.
There are also some important benefits that DevOps can give, this includes the following:
1. Performance in Oriented Culture
2. Increased Collaboration and Communication
3. Improved the ability to Innovate and Research
4. Improve the satisfaction and the experience of the customers
5. Enabling business
6. Digital transformation
7. Faster resolution of the problems
8. Faster delivery of the features when it comes to business
9. Less complex problems that is needed to be fixed
10. Continuous delivery of the software
11. Much stable operating environment
12. More time available
13. And increased the effectiveness
Here are some of the benefits and the advantages of the DevOps that can definitely help a business, the development and the IT operations.

Get More Familiar with Devops

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Devops, also known as the clipped compound of “development “ and “operations” pertains to movement, culture or practice which emphasizes communication and collaboration of Information Technology or IT experts and software developers while both automates software delivery process as well as infrastructure changes. Devops aims to establish environment and culture where testing, building and releasing software can happen frequently, rapidly and can take place more rapidly.
Devops is said to be the combination of tasks carried out by a particular company’s system operations and application development. This term is now being used in many different ways. Devops broadest meaning is defined as the philosophy promoting better communication between development and operation as more essential elements of operations turn out to be programmable.
In its narrow meaning, Devops describes a part of the IT team of a certain organization which creates then maintains infrastructure. This term can also be used to describe team of software engineers strategically looking for complete chain of software delivery overseeing the shared services and mastering the utilization of best practices and development tools.
The Different Sub-Concepts of Devops
Devops is now becoming a buzzword and many organizations and individuals are talking about it. Devops is not really a tool, innovative framework or technology. This is more of concepts and philosophy. Devops is composed of two emerging words; development and operations.
Devops is known to include different sub-concepts like:
• Continuous Integration
This is more about the culture of incorporating source code or application code to source code repositories. Build tools are utilized to verify check in through integrating the source code repositories and continuous tools for integration.
• Continuous Testing
Unit testing or automated testing is used for such type of automated testing and these reliable tools are properly integrated in continuous integration behavior via tools.
• Cloud Provisioning or Continuous Provisioning
Cloud instance or virtual machines are flexible and highly available with pay per use feature. It is also ultimately beneficial to make different forms of instances for diverse environments such as staging, production, testing and development.
• Configuration Management
This concept is also useful especially in terms of making runtime environment entirely ready in more consistent manner all across all environments. There are configuration management tools that can be used to easily manage given resources.
• Continuous Deployment or Delivery
Continuous deployment or continuous delivery is a term commonly use day by day. Continuous delivery is being used when the package file is deployment ready to any environment while continuous deployment on the other hand is the term used when the package file is production-deployment ready.
Many companies and individuals are now using Devops for varied reasons. Those that practice Devops have reported amazing benefits which include significantly short market time, greater product quality, more improved client satisfaction, reliable releases, efficiency and more. The benefits also include building the right products through fast experimentations. Though individuals and companies have different stands and personal views about Devops, no one can deny the unique sets of benefits it brings.

— Slimane Zouggari

DevOps as a Practice

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Devops is a practice and movement that emphasizes communication and collaboration of IT operations and software developers. This also automates the process of infrastructure changes and software delivery. Apart from it, its main goal is to establish an environment and culture wherein testing, releasing and building of software can happen more reliably, frequently and rapidly.
Such a common term in the technical community, people sometimes have contradictory and confused impressions of it. But, really, this requires some nuisance to be able to understand it completely.
DevOps Definition
DevOps is now the newest term that emerges from the collision of 2 major trends- the first one is the “agile system administration” while the other one is an expanded understanding of collaboration and its value between operations and development staff in the entire stages of development lifecycle. This is especially in terms of operating and creating a service. This is also prior to the significance of operations in the service-oriented world.
As per the definition of Jez Humble, he clearly explained that DevOps is somehow a cross-disciplinary community of practice and is dedicated to the study of evolving, building and operating changing and rapid resilient systems at a scale. This may already be a good definition but this may be specific and esoteric to internet-based startup types. We can simply define DevOps as something as:
DevOps is considered as a practice of development engineers and operations engineers that participate together in the service lifecycle, from the development process to the design process up to the production support.
Apart from it, this is characterized by the operations staff that makes use of a lot of similar techniques just like the developers. This way, their systems will simply work. As per the techniques, these can range from the use of source control to testing and participating in an Agile developmental process.
“Ops” is considered to be a blanket term intended for system administrators, systems engineers, release engineers, operations staff, network engineers, security professionals and DBA’s. “Dev” is also utilized as shorthand for those developers. But, in reality, it may mean of people exactly involved in the development of the product. This may necessarily include QA, Product and other discipline types.
DevOps and its Benefits
For those companies and businesses that practice DevOps, they have reported some of the significant benefits such as an enhanced customer satisfaction, shorter time-to-market, better quality product, improved productivity, reliable releases, efficiency and more. Apart from it, they also have built the right and the best product through fast experimentation.
DevOps toolchain
Since DevOps means a cultural collaboration and shift between operations and development, there is really no unique tool or toolchain that consist of multiple tools. DevOps tools can also exactly fit into 1 or more categories of code, build, test, package, release, configure and monitor.
Even though there are tools available in the market, others still attempt of identifying the basic tools right through the existing literature. Tools like Puppet, Jenkins, Docker, Vagrant and more are frequently referenced and used in the tooling discussions of DevOps.

— Slimane Zouggari

What is this DevOps thing?

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DevOps is a terminology for a cluster of perceptions that take catalyzed into an undertaking and are spreading rapidly all the way through the technical community. People all over the world are sometimes contradictory and somewhat confused of what it is for real. The DevOps is known to be a huge thought that it necessitates some distinction to entirely understand it.
The Definition of DevOps
The DevOps is known to be a culture, practice or somewhat a movement that accentuates the communication and the collaboration of both information technology (IT) and software developer’s experts while mechanizing the procedure of the delivery of the software and the changes in the infrastructure. It is a new term that materializes from the impact of the two (2) main related trends. The first trend is the “agile system administration” or known as the “agile operations”, this bounded from smearing fresher lean and agile methodologies to operations work. Second is the much lengthened appreciative of the worth of collaboration between the operations and development staff all the way through all the stages of the lifecycle of the development when operating and creating a service, and just how essential the operations has turn out to be in the world that is increasingly-service-oriented.
DevOps is said to be a cross disciplinary municipal of practice enthusiastic to the studying of the operating, building and evolving quickly altering irrepressible schemes at scale. It is also the preparation of development and operations engineers that are contributing together in the whole service lifecycle, from the design over and done with the process of development and to the production support. DevOps has a robust empathy with lean and agile approaches. It can be understood as the outgrowth of the agile. DevOps is merely outspreading the principles of Agile further than the limitations of “the code” to the whole delivered service.
A Depth Definition
DevOps, it means a lot of numerous diverse things to dissimilar people for the reason of the discussion that is around it cover a lot of scope. Many people are talking and describing Davos as the collaboration of operations and developer. The great way to describe and define the Davos is the use of the parallel method to the explanation of a correspondingly multifaceted term; it is called the agile development. This is consisted of different levels (4 levels) of concern. This is the agile values, these are the center value that notifies the agile, second is the agile principles, this is generally agreed upon the strategic approaches that support the values, the third id the agile methods, a more specific methods of implementation of the principles, the agile practices is the last level, this is an extremely definite tactical method that is tended to use in the conjunction with the implementations of the agile, the third one is the agile. This is believed by many people that the different parts and levels of the DevOps are just the same as the agile parts and levels; they are in the same level.

— Slimane Zouggari