the idea that change is extremely risky. For the singletons in either group that tried to
make change to the overall processes, they’d find themselves stuck in the mire of
becoming the subject matter expert, locked into the positions of support that became
critical to maintain.
In 2001, an invite went out to folks interested and active in the Extreme Program‐
ming (XP) community and others within the field. XP was a form of Agile develop‐
ment that was designed to be more responsive to changing requirements than
previous development software methodologies, known for short release cycles, exten‐
sive testing, and pair programming. Seventeen software engineers got together in
Snowbird Utah to discuss software development. They summarized their shared
common values to capture the adaptiveness and response to change that they wanted
to see in development with an explicit emphasis on human factors. This Agile Mani‐
festo was the rallying cry that started the agile movement.
In 2004, Alistair Cockburn, a software developer who was one of the co-authors of
the Agile Manifesto, described Crystal Clear a software development methodology
for small teams based off of 10 years of research with successful teams. It described 3
common properties frequent delivery of usable code, reflective improvement, and
osmotic communication between developers. Crystal also described 3 priorities
safety, efficiency, and habitability.
This movement continued in software development for several years, and later began
to have its influence felt elsewhere. In 2006, Marcel Wegermann wrote an essay on
how to take the principles of Crystal Clear, Scrum, and Agile and applying them to
the field of system administration. Along with Agile and Scrum, it contained several
ideas that Wegermann argued could be applied to system administration as well as
software development, wanting to bring newer and better practices to the field. In
addition to giving a lightning talk on the subject where he suggested ideas such as
version control for the Linux operating system’s /etc directory, pair system adminis‐
tration, and operational retrospectives, he also started the Agile System Administra‐
tion mailing list.
As web technology continued to grow and evolve, the ways that people communica‐
ted and collaborated online did too. Twitter, an online social networking service was
introduced to the world not even a year later in 2006. At first it seemed very much
like a tool for people wanting to share information in an abbreviated format, for short
attention spans or for celebrities to reach out to fans. In 2007, however, the South by
Southwest Interactive conference saw the use of Twitter skyrocket as Twitter placed
screens in the hallways streaming twitter messages. Twitter quickly became a way for
ad-hoc communities to be formed across the globe. For conferences, it was a way to
get additional value out of the multi-track systems and connect with like minded
individuals. The hallway track, a phrase often used to describe the interactions and
conversations that take place in the hallways of conferences, had expanded from the
The History of Devops | 15