My review of the book “The Phoenix Project.”
Not everyone knows the pain behind the evolution of software development and operations of today’s more modern techniques and methodologies.
They are still not perfectly easy, but they were horrible back then. Agile SDLC, Scrum and Kanban, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, and many others are not simply lip-services. They were developed after many long and painful experiences and still see revisions today.
It is almost always the safest bet to say that something is not perfect. So, even today’s modern approaches are not excellent. But, those who experienced the hell pits of software delivery of the past know how these solutions are a lot better if used properly.
I was there when we did annual and semi-annual deployments. I was there when we had to troubleshoot gigantic applications with so many configuration points in production. I was there when no one knew what we were all talking about during a severe bug impacting our customers. I was there when we had to deliver multiple DLL files to our technical support guys to get more logs from production because that was the only way to see what was going in the production besides the Event Viewer dumps. I was there when we all collectively suffered from the ancient practices of software development, delivery, and operations.
You should read this book if you want to be there too and glimpse how yesterday was, what today looks like, and how tomorrow can be.
The Phoenix Project talks about a newly promoted vice president’s life, named Bill Palmer. His journey of transforming his company, called Parts Unlimited for the better. His analytical mind, honest explanations of the problem, and struggles against the company’s perception of IT can be seen vividly in this book. They are informative and accurate in many companies out there.
Even though the book is fiction, the problems and solutions are too real. There is no VP named Bill Palmer, but there is Work in Process (Progress) hell in IT. There is no Parts Unlimited, but there are painful rollbacks after deployments go incorrectly. There is no CEO named Steve, but there are severe conflicts between devs and ops, which DevOps tries to address.
The Phoenix Project is the codename of the company’s new initiative, which promised to improve everything and drive more revenue. But, the life of software development and operations is not that simple sometimes. And, this is what you are going to read in this book.