Willy-P. Schaub

I am one of the agents of chaos who passionately argued the importance of removing barriers and recognizing that people are the core of a healthy DevOps mindset. Fast-forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which collocated teams were forced to disperse overnight into self-isolating distributed entities, relying on technology to bring us all back together in a virtual world. As I write this, it is day 56 of self-isolation, and I am working remotely from home.

Kanban is nothing new; in fact, it predates most readers of this article. Its age becomes apparent when we add the year Toyota introduced kanban in its main plant machine shop (1953) to the timeline image from our analyzing the DNA of DevOps article. I have intuitively been using kanban, in one form or the other, for more than two decades to track personal plans, engineering projects, and digital transformations.

In electrical engineering, a transient fault is defined as an error condition that vanishes after the power is disconnected and restored. This is also a workaround many of us unconsciously use when we forcefully power our physical devices off and on when they're performing poorly or frozen on a blue crash screen filled with gibberish.