Engineering consulting firm Release Engineering Approaches is currently working with Salesforce.com on DevOps issues such as retrospectives, a process that determines what went well and what didn’t go well, as well as how to improve next time.

“They have a complex system that they operate for their customers, and sometimes it has service impacts or outages due to changes that they make,” said J. Paul Reed, principal consultant at Release Engineering Approaches. “There’s an incident and a team that works on those incidents. The challenge is how to take that data, collect it in an actionable way, talk about it in a healthy way and then feed that back into the system to make improvements.”

The meaning of accountability

Reed also discussed post-mortem processes with Brian Gracely, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. “There is a difference between accountability and responsibility,” he said. “Everyone is held accountable for their behavior, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are responsible for a particular failure.”

Some technicians may wonder where the value in DevOps lies. “Humans contribute to the success of the organization and the successful operation of the technology just as much as they contribute to the failure,” Reed explained.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE