PurePerformance - Scaling Agile at Dynatrace with Andrea Holl

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

SAFE, LESS or the Spotify Model? Which scaled agile method to apply for your transformation? Or are you unique enough like 44% of organizations based on a European research that are defining their own scaled agile approach to transform successfully?In this episode we sit down with Andrea Holl, Agile Coach at Dynatrace, and let her walk us through the different scaled agile frameworks. She discusses the pros and cons and why many organizations – including Dynatrace – are coming up with their own approaches. For Dynatrace it was about taking the best from the proven frameworks but adapting them to allow us continue or core cultural values such as full autonomy to teams and flexibility of tools and processes.If you are on the brink of a transformation make sure to listen to Andrea and how she and her teams have approached that transformational project!https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrea-elisabeth-holl-b2255a112/https://www.scaledagileframework.com/https://less.works/https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf

It's time for Pure Performance! Get your stopwatches ready, it's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Pure Performance. My name is Brian Wilson and just to prove this isn't a recorded intro because I say the same thing every time, I'm doing it this way. So hi, and here's my co-host Andy Grabner. Andy, it's been a long time since we chatted. How have you been since yesterday? Since yesterday evening? Not too bad actually yeah um still here it's still in it's still late in the evening it's still dark outside i think yesterday what i didn't tell people that before the podcast recording gabi and i actually went out to the city

and we got some glue van which probably explains why i came up with some strange words yesterday, like talking partner instead of guests. So maybe I was, it's a glue. No, it's mild wine. It's mild wine. Ah, okay.

I never heard. I mean, yeah, I'd never heard that before. Uh, next time we have a perform, um, you might have to,

well, I don't know if they'll have mold wine during perform next year, but I was going to say, you know, maybe, maybe bring some over. We should, yeah. It's also very special right now because, you know, we're on lockdown.

And so all the Christmas markets won't happen. And so we were like walking through the streets of Linz yesterday. And then we found this little like a food truck. And they opened and they sold a punch and mulled wine. And so we decided to have a mulled wine and then walk back home. And then I did the podcast under the influence a little bit. Hopefully I didn't miss it that too much. Well, we do have a speaking partner on today, right?

We do have a speaking partner, yeah. By the way, I think alcohol always improves the podcast. My only issue is that it's too early in the morning for mine. But yes, we have a speaking partner today. partner yeah i think by the way i think alcohol always improves the podcast mainly issues that's too early in the morning for for mine um but yes we have a speaking partner today um why don't we go ahead and you want to introduce our speaking partner and our topic yeah so our speaking partner or i don't may call it guest today is andrea hall hi andrea how are you hi Hi, I'm fine. Thank you. How are you? Oh, very good. Still sober. Welcome to the show.

Yeah. Welcome to the show. Hey, Andrea, could you do us the favor and quickly introduce yourself? What do you do right now? I mean, I know people will have read this in the title and abstract that you are working at Dynatrace. But give us a little bit more background on what you do there and then also maybe what you did before Dynatrace too. Just some background on you.

Sure. So my name is Andrea and I've been working at Dynatrace since March this year. So I'm quite new. I'm an HR coach here and I've been working with several HR development teams at the same time. My passion is to support teams and also team members to improve their situation, actually, and also the way of HR development. And yeah, in addition, as an HR coach at Dynatrace, we also help to improve on an organizational level.

Yeah, right. Yeah. What did i do before um i started about i guess it's nearly 10 years ago um as a software developer and um yeah after a few years i decided to become a product owner and now here at dynatrace, I'm an agile coach. And yeah, I'm very happy about that. Very cool. Hey, so when you talk, you brought up some interesting terms. You talked about transformation. You talked about helping people to get better, becoming more agile, obviously, but you're

an agile coach. But you also talked about organizational changes um i think we as an industry it seems everybody's trying to transform whether they call it digital transformation where they a lot talk about like updating and modernizing their technology and how they deliver and deploy digital services to the customers but i think in most of the cases, when we look behind the scenes, we always talk about this 80-20 rule, meaning it's only a 20% technology change, but it's actually an 80% culture

or people or organizational change. Can you relate to that? Does this make sense when we talk about change that the biggest part and the hardest part is actually organizational and people and processes? Yes, that totally makes sense because um every time if you want to change something it's all about people so you need to be aware that um everyone is um just working at the um at his daily businesses um and um yeah it's it's always

something new and you need to communicate that and you need to train people um to do something new so you um it's it's not so easy to get um new changes or improvements in the organization because of cultural things and and things like that yeah now here's the big million dollar question for you um well everybody tries to transform and they need to transform yet it seems there is no blueprint to just say we do these 10 steps and then we have transformed um and i guess the reason for that is because not everybody is the same not every person is the same not every person is the same. Not every organization is the same. Not every business is the same. Yet, I know Brian, in our conversations,

I think it was with Adam Auerbach a couple of months ago, we talked about agile frameworks. I think the term SAFE came up, the Scaled Agile Framework. Yeah, yeah. Right? Remember that? Yep. So, Andrea, could you kind of to to start this conversation because i know what you've been what you're trying to do at dynatrace

right you're trying to kind of transform the organization so that it makes sense for dynatrace because dynatrace is unique in a way that every organization is unique and therefore we need we need uh maybe you start from some some some best practices blueprints but then you have to find out the right way for that organization can you give us a little overview first though of about like some agile basic concepts uh i think scaled agile is a term a top a term that you brought up in the when you introduced the topic to us can you give us just a little background on what people need to know and what this actually

all means? Sure. So first of all, when we talk about scaled HL models, I think we should go a few steps back and talk about the whole idea about HL software development because I think this is very necessary

to know if you think about the scaled Agile concept. So the thing behind Agile software development is that it focuses on just close connections and ongoing communications between all involved people, also including the customer, because the most important thing is to provide value for our customers in the end. And therefore, we need to welcome change, not strictly following a plan all the time. And also to invite stakeholders to give regular feedback on the current state of the development. And all the simple frameworks you mentioned, like Scrum and and Kanban do have this base in mind. But they all have one in common. The recommended team size for these simple HR frameworks is up to nine people.

And it's even more complex to develop one product with several teams at the same time. You have then to solve cross-team dependencies. You have to ensure a good communication flow across all teams. And you have to make sure that everyone is aware of the big picture and the vision. And this is not easy if you work with a team up to 801,000 developers. So you need to ensure the required alignment by also keeping flexibility in the teams. That's a big thing during Agile development.

Yeah, by constantly keeping the Agile values in mind, of course. And that's when you need to think about scaled Agile models. That's interesting. I mean, I think I guess I've never thought about this, that obviously I'm aware and familiar with Scrum and Kanban, but that these models have really been designed initially

for very small agile teams. And the size of nine is interesting. Now, with scaled agile, can you give us some additional ideas what are some popular frameworks what are some approaches on how to scale these agile concepts from small individual teams to larger teams yes of course so So there have been developed many Scaled Agile Frameworks since now. So the most popular SAFe, which is short for Scaled Agile Framework, also LESS, which is short for Large Scale Scrum or the Spotify model, which is named after the company Spotify. So, yeah, I can dive into some of these if you want to.

Yeah, it would be great at least. You know, I think just as me and probably Brian, a lot of our listeners are, I'm sure, familiar with the term agile and what agile development in general means. But when we start hearing SAVE, LESS, Spotify model, I think some basic understanding would be interesting what these models include because obviously where we want to get to later on in the conversation is why can't just every

organization simply pick one of those and apply them one to one and then be be done with it why do we still need to change and adapt to our individual needs and how did we do the dynamic so that's why a little overview a little background on some of these scaled Azure frameworks would be really great. Yeah, sure. So they all have one in common, basically. So they all want to connect people who work on one product. And, for example, SAFe is a huge knowledge base about methods, practices, and things like that.

It's so detailed that it's even too complex for many companies or many people to use it. But the good thing is that you can find everything in detail, which you need basically to introduce this framework. But the thing is, and they recommend it by themselves as well, that you should think about hiring one of these safe consultants to do the whole transformation process because it's so complex. But the good thing is that you can use it for up to 1,000 developers or even more. But you could also use it for fewer teams.

So just thinking about four or five teams. So it offers you structures, workflows, and things like that, that you can overcome these cross-team dependencies, that you have a good planning situation and a good working deployment workflow. Yeah. And what is nice at Safe as well is that it provides autonomy for the team so they can use their own workflows, which is quite similar to Dynatrace, basically. And that's what I really like about SAFe.

Less compared to SAFe is a way more simpler approach for a scaled Azure framework. It's based on Scrum, so all the teams have to work with Scrum, but you can just scale it for up to eight Scrum teams. I mean, they have an additional approach, which is called

Less Huge, and then it's possible to scale it for even more teams. The positive thing about it is that it is very understandable. So it's very easy, has simple workflows. It's based on all well-known elements of Scrum. So if you know Scrum, it's quite an easy thing to introduce less i guess um yeah but um yeah the negative um aspect is that you have to work with scrum so if you want to find your own ways because something is working best for your teams or better for your teams then this is not possible yeah and i don't know if i uh elaborate on the spotify model as well yeah

maybe maybe just a couple of sentences because i think the spotify model has been floating around a lot over the last couple of years and i think you did a great job by the way with safe and less and explaining the differences and uh so yeah if you could just you know a minute or two on the spotify model would really help us to understand it better uh yeah i mean the spotify model is um named after the company as it did and um it's so well known because of the success of this company actually so it was published in 2012 and And when they published it, they had a smaller size compared to Dynabrace. So they had 30 teams and about 150 devs.

And it's a very, very simple concept. So it offers four main elements. Squads, which is quite similar to scrum teams. Then tribes, which is quite an area of a product. Like if you think of the Spotify music player or the app or the web app, could be one tribe. And guilds and chapters, which are additional organizational elements for knowledge sharing and things like that. But the thing is that since 2012,

they didn't publish any updates. So we don't know if they did any further improvements because yeah he didn't publish it but I think you know that they have very nice culture videos published based on this framework it's kind of hand drawn sketches and he explained it very well the Finnish videos are quite famous yeah I really liked it very well. Within these videos, they're quite famous. Yeah, I really liked it. Very cool. Yeah, I was familiar with their squads, tribes, guilds, and chapter concepts. But also great to know that they obviously built this model, or at least when they published it,

they were, from a size perspective, 150 developers. And obviously since then, they must have grown dramatically. So it would really be interesting to talk to them again and see how they have evolved their model over the years and how they've adapted it. So Andrea, thanks for the introduction. So we have learned about different scale data frameworks, Safe, Less, than the Spotify model.

And now the question for me is, so why can't, as an organization, I just pick one of the models and apply it? Well, let's say that way, you were brought to Dynatrace as an Agile coach to help us make sure that our organization can stay Agile autonomous. I think I'm sure you'll talk a little bit more about what it is that we want to achieve.

Now, how have you approached the whole thing? And have you tried some of these models? What have you learned and what did you have to adapt? And where do we stand right now? Yeah, sure. So when we started, we did a lot of research concerning good practices from other companies and of course of these frameworks. And we found out that all of these existing frameworks do not fit perfectly into the Dynadri as well. Because you will find individual elements in all organizations concerning existing structures, roles, cultures, the customer collaboration and things like that.

And of course, at Danadrys, we have a lot of well-working elements which we would like to keep in future. For example, our open-minded culture. We believe that decisions should be made by those who are the experts in their fields. And also I talked about autonomous teams. We believe that every team should find their own processes, events,

workflows, and everything they want to use because it simply works best for them. So, yeah, we also have eight solutions at Dynatrace with different sizes, meaning that they have a broad range concerning the number of teams and team members. There are many well-established organizational team structures as well as roles. And the interesting thing is that I read about a survey which was conducted in Germany at the University of Koblenz, and they asked 650 companies about their scaled Azure framework approach. And it's very interesting that 44% said, and that was the second highest number of the safe, that they're going to use their own approach.

So I think that's very eye-opening. And that's just what I said. Every company has their own approaches and their well-working elements, which they want to use in future. And then it's very difficult to use one of these existing um frameworks so 44 percent that's but i you're right i mean this is an eye-opening number because it just means there is no there's no i mean these blueprints that we have are obviously just not universally applicable

and i think that's also the the uniqueness of every company that you find your own way your own culture and maintain your own way of doing it because every company also had history right as you said right we have we have a history and how we build things and how things work and and and then you don't want to completely force yourself into a model that may not that is completely contradictory to some of the aspects of what if what you have been doing for for a long long time yeah yeah so and let me ask you a question so you you came on board he said in march or nine months ago um and what besides doing all the research on what's out there and finding finding these things like the cobran's research what else what else did you do then how did you then analyze the situation at dynatrace to figure out in which direction we need to know where we need to go because i think our listeners that also are at the same kind of you

know step in their transformation they also most likely want to hear from you okay what did you do next in order to figure out what what to do next basically yeah yeah um that's a good question because i think it's very important to get to know your the context so first of all we conducted a qualitative survey within dynatrace so we interviewed 10 people at Dynatrace and asked them for what challenges they do face at the moment. And there were some quite interesting results. For example, many people said that it's getting more and more complex with more and more people and that it's important to clarify all the roles and responsibilities and things like that. And also said that they wish to have more collaboration convention

but also to preserve autonomy and flexibility. So they want to have these guidelines, but also to have freedom in the usage of these guidelines. So no strict rules at all. That's an important thing. And yeah, I mentioned before the organizational culture. And that was also a thing which was said during the interviews that people had concerns to go a few steps back when changing the way of collaboration concerning the organizational culture. So you can see how much people at Danitrys love the culture here. So that was the first thing.

And then we started to define the first draft of the way how we are working. Just a simple concept, which we then wanted to have feedback from our colleagues and so on. So then we started to, yeah, we founded a community, actually, which we call Let's Rock HR. And I really liked his name. Yeah, and the aim of this community was to, yeah, first of all, further improve this own approach, but also discuss good practices and find new ways how these guidelines, how these workflows and processes and all these things which are within this HR, the skilled HR framework can work in the organization at least. So, and another good thing was that, I mean, the community included about 15 people.

So we had many people, um, uh, which, uh, yeah, could communicate to other, uh, colleagues. So we got a lot of feedback, um, um, yeah, for this scale HR framework framework and yeah also we we tried to community uh communicate um to all other dynamic racers by writing blog posts and things like that so just get awareness for other things yeah yeah i think it's great that you are obviously you're not just there as let's say a quote unquoteunquote outsider that looks at the company and then come up with some new ideas and then force it on them but you actually well you started with the survey then with the draft and then you founded a community i also like the term let's rock agile and and then you know kind of shaped what the future state of agile needs to look like at Dynatrace with all these people.

And then you're right, right? If you have 15 people and then they talk with their teams, with their colleagues, and then they all bring back their feedback. Now, can you, for the listeners that may not be aware of this, can you give some numbers on how many teams currently we have at Dynatrace, how many people in the R&D organization so that people can actually get a little sense on how big we are and how they may compare? Yeah, at Dynatrace we have in total 2,400 employees

at 50 locations and in total 800 employees within the research and development department so nearly 800 developers spread around the world and yeah and this is by far not the end of the blend organizational group so that's a lot yeah it's very big at the moment in in your research that you did and also then in your in your community did you find that there was a difference of what hl needs to be based on maybe geography maybe based on location i know we have teams in austria with teams in poland in barcelona with teams in the us um have you uh have you observed that there's maybe certain regions and cultures that are just tending towards a different approach to hl and bring in different ideas that we haven't seen in others

actually i didn't find any differences i mean I did a lot of research concerning all this HR stuff. And no, I mean, HR development is based on the HR manifesto and which has been developed in the US. And many of these scale HR frameworks also have been developed in the US from people which are based in the US. So, I mean, it could be that there are small differences, but, I mean, you need to consider all these HR values and all your HR frameworks.

So, I think there can't be so big difference. Very good. So if we may go on. So what I've learned so far is we started doing some research on what ours are doing. Then we looked at what we are doing currently, what actually makes up Dynatrace as an organization, right? It's the kind of the, we wanted to have, we want to allow people to stay autonomous using their own tools and processes as much as they can. So give them the freedom that they want

in order to be innovative. Yet we obviously see a lot of growth and therefore we had to figure out what does scaled agile actually look for us. And then we are including, you have included a community of people within the organization to shape the next iteration of Agile at Dynatrace. Did I get this right, kind of, just a summary?

Yeah, sounds good to me. Okay. Now here's my question. How do you then, from your community, your Let let's rock agile at dynatrace community the outcome that you get there how do you then start applying this do you start applying this starting with a with one team and then see how this works with uh i think in our case it's called the solution try it there do you try it for the whole organization at once because you think we have to do it at once because all these individual

solutions also have to work together so how do you get started applying these things then so everything uh what we have done so far is not my uh my own effort alone so um everything has been started at the hl competenceence Center at Benetris. And in the Agile Competence Center, we have Agile coaches and also Agile program manager, which help to form the structure and the workflows of the solution. So together, we try to introduce these things and now it's about yeah it's up and running for about 50 percent of our teams here at linds yeah can you then tell me how does this your your your hl your hl coaches um are you

working with the teams are you becoming then team members of these teams that you enable or do you still how are you structured are you more like a mentoring role and you're you're then just working on and off with teams or how does this work yeah um yeah we are not really a team member at the moment because we have so many teams and only about five HR coaches in Austria, so that wouldn't work. We are more like a mentor or a consultant for the teams, and we help other teams when we see that, okay, they have challenges, things like that, and we want to help them solve or overcome these challenges. So everyone, all teams can ask for help, for support.

And if it's available, we of course want to help everyone. What have been your biggest challenges so far in that in that phase what do you what is the biggest what is the toughest thing for you um the toughest thing that's a good question i mean i've been working for a quite small company before I started at Dynatrace. So a big challenge here is even if the culture is very open-minded and there is a very low part, you need to communicate to many people, of course. So to get everyone on the same page and to get these awareness, you need to do such transformation things. That's a really huge challenge here.

Do you also have resistance? I mean, besides obviously communication is a challenge. Yes, that's understandable. You need to communicate with a lot of people across teams. Do you also have people that resist that change? And if so, how do you counter that? Because I assume our listeners that want to transform in their own organization, they may also have some that resist change, right?

There's obviously we're humans and some of us, we resist change right there's certain that there's obviously we're humans and some some of us we resist change because the status quo might be more comfortable so um basically let me ask the question that way uh if people face resistance what is the best way to argue that change is actually good um yeah that's also a very interesting question because of course you always will find someone who don't want to go the way with you because of any reasons it could be fear it could be something else and the thing is that you need to talk to the people, to explain everything in detail, and also to explain that it will improve in the future. And so that they will benefit from them.

And yeah, so that fear is not necessary at the time. So, but yeah, you need to talk a lot to people. And, but that's necessary. And this is a good thing. So I think you mentioned that, you know, the process is not, not done yet.

It's a constant learning and constant evolving, but what are the next steps for you now? So what, besides, you know, helping more and more teams to, to, to get on board, I think you said 50% of the teams in Linz

have already been on board. And that's, I think, roughly, as far as I can count, we have about 400 or so people working out of the Linz office. What's next? Yeah, we will continue with our work at Linz here, of course. So the next thing is that we want to finish, at least finish the first version of the scaled agent model

and also to communicate or to publish it internally and also externally. We will, of course, continue all the time improving it. So we will, every time when we work with this concept, with these guidelines, we will find things that don't work as good as we thought at the beginning. So there's always things to do and yeah i think we have a lot to do in future with this concept and with this yeah large-scale digital approach we have here done at risk now did you come up with a great name like s or save or spotify model did you have a yeah that's not so easy. I mean, we are still working on that. It's not

easy to find a name which is easy to use. So yeah, we're still working on that, but I hope we will find a good name in future. I think Andy might want to suggest the Andy model.

The Andy model? Sounds want to suggest the Andy model. Sounds good to me, yeah. I mean, you definitely, you know, you could call it the Dynadrives model, but then that's a ripoff of the Spotify model, right? I mean, that's too easy to guess, but I'm pretty sure. I thought, Andrea, because in, you know, in leading up to this podcast, you sent us some notes on what you want to discuss. And the term that I see in that email is, it's under quotes,

but it's called the Agile Interface. I kind of like that, right? I mean, it's, I'm not sure. That was just a working title. So it's not the title we are going to use. The Agile interface was because of the concept that we have just this kind of building blocks in the model, so everyone can use these elements he needs and adapt it for their own needs. And that's why we call it the Agile interface. But as I said, it's only a work in seed land.

Maybe we will find something better. So if you have any ideas, I'm open for that, of course. Yeah, well, Brian, we should do a shout out to our listeners and come up with some ideas and let us know. Yeah. Somehow you have to work in the sound of music. Of course. The Von Trapp model.

Figure out if you can make Trapp T-R-A-P-P work, right? That's got the A for agile performance process. You might be able to make it and you know I always go back to that because of you Andy because way back you had an amazing when you compared Australia with Austria right in one of your old decks and that always just stuck with me

I'm not doing it just to crack on Austria it's more because of you I know thank you so much no it's and it's more because of you I know, thank you so much and it's, you know, obviously a lot of people around the world know Austria because of the sound of music, even though we as Austrians will never understand why, because there's so many better things to

remember Austria for like Arnold or Red Bull what else do we have, Mozart we have Mozart Kart we have mozart mozart googling exactly falco see yeah exactly here we go yeah um andrea i want to ask you uh one question now that let's assume uh i am a new employee starting at dynatrace in R&D, and it's my first day at work. And then I approach you and then I say,

hey, Andrea, I'm new. Can you please explain to me the agile, the scaled agile framework we use here at Dynatrace and what are the building blocks? So I assume you have like a short version description of like our models like in the spotify model you have the squads the tribes the guilds and the chapters do you have like a quick summary of like an elevator pitch or can be longer than an elevator right but if somebody's new and you just say by the way this is how we do it at Dynatrace. This is the high-level overview of it.

I do not have an elevator pitch, but I can explain it, of course. The thing behind the whole concept is, as I said before, we want to connect all the people and bring them together and to have also very tight feedback loops and to guarantee that our teams can work autonomously we provide this kind of building blocks what you can you can find like any events artifacts yeah and things like that. You can use these building blocks. We have just a few base building blocks which you need to use because of course we need to guarantee that we are going to ship a product in the end so there is something which we need, but you can use this additional building blocks and build your team approach, which is best for you at the end.

Do you have some examples of those building blocks, just out of curiosity, if you're allowed to share? Yes, of course, I mean, base buildings, blocks like review meetings, retrospectives, things like that, which you're definitely know from other frameworks. So we, of course, do not invent everything new because, yeah, I mean, why shouldn't we use things which are working? So we have this kind of elements. And what you can use in addition are, for example, cross-team plannings, pre-planning, and there are more like these elements. So it's like kind of events you can um yeah combine for your own purposes okay so that means yeah makes a lot

of sense so building block i mean now now i understand also what you mean with building blocks like if i if for my own team i want to make sure that uh you i i can go to your let's say catalog of building blocks and i see how how I should run my review meetings, my retrospectives, how I engage with cross-team plannings, and then to make sure that all the teams are aligned. And so I think that makes sense. That's the thing that I was missing, kind of, what do you mean with building blocks?

And now I get it. Very cool. Andrea, is there anything else that you want to advise to people that are listening to this episode and say, hey, I'm also at the brink of, you know, which agile transformation, which agile way is it going to be for me? Or maybe they're not happy with the current way of doing things and they want to do something new do you have any piece of advice also looking back to your last you know nine months at dynatrace or even before that what can you tell people that they should or should not do just as like some final remarks um yeah i mean the most important thing is that don't be afraid for the transformation because you will always face a lot of challenges during the whole transformation phase,

but it's worth it. So you need to emphasize all the people and just, yeah, i don't know help help people uh finding their their way through the transformation phase i mean that's i guess the most important thing um in such kind of yeah um transformation phases at least yeah yeah it's like everything in life right if we are we need coaches sometimes the people that help us on an important step where we are changing our regular patterns and it's always good to have somebody there that shows us the new way and then also helps us the first time we walk this new way and go in that direction absolutely yeah very cool um brian yes andy you've been you've been awfully

quiet today i know you've been talking a lot yesterday when we did the last recording yeah well i have a quote there's a quota that i cannot exceed you know and in all honesty, my history with Agile is, so before I started in Dynatrace in 2011, I was at WebMD. And about the last six months before I left, they hired an Agile, so this was like 2011, hired an Agile consulting firm to try to move from Waterfall to Agile. And I remember we were in a couple of meetings where they were explaining everything to us. And since we were in the performance load testing team,

everyone was like, well, there's no way you could fit into this anyway. So that's the end of it for you. And then I left and I've been a sales engineer since. So I've never actually had experience or have to have gone through any of these transformations with agile. It's something, especially if you think about it from traditional load testing point of view, it's always kind of mind-blowing. How are you going to do load testing in two weeks? Script maintenance and everything.

Obviously, since 2011 until now, there's been tons and tons of changes, tons of different approaches, tons of different ways of thinking about performance since then. But I know initially it was just like never on my radar. I kind of escaped having to go through that. I mean, I knew waterfall was just awful. But it changed much to Andrea's point. The change is going to be painful as all heck. If we were going to go from traditional performance testing waterfall to some sort of two-week agile model without these new concepts that have been

introduced in between uh yeah that was just something i had zero interest in having to go through and i didn't have to but i do want to say it sounds you know we hear this and andrea i think you did an excellent job uh touching on this point but maybe um not quite you know the way i heard what i heard when you were saying it was, just like we see when you're thinking about a pipeline, just what we see when you're thinking about which frameworks to pick. If we're going to go with serverless, are we going to go with Kubernetes?

Even with that, it's not an all or nothing. You use serverless where it makes sense. You use Kubernetes where it makes sense. If you have something that, if you have mainframe, all right, great, the mainframe is running, it's doing its job, everything's running fine, leave it. When it comes to picking your agile frameworks, or for lack of a better word, it sounds like it's a very similar thing. You have a lot of models that exist that can guide you and give you ideas of what might work, but

really it sounds like if it's going to be successful and it's going to make the team happy, use the models as a model, but find what's going to work and discover what's going to work. Learn about Agile, learn about the pros and cons of everything to develop what's going to fit the people who work there, the way they've been working, the culture, what the goals are even. I'm sure the different models let you achieve slightly different goals in different ways. So just like anything else, it sounds like it's not a religion. You do this and this is the right way.

It's more pick and choose what's going to work, which that always gets challenging because everyone wants the easy button. Follow these instructions and you're good to go. But I don't think we see that anywhere. I almost kind of did a little bit of a summerator, but not really much, Andy. Yeah, you did. No, you did. You did an awesome job.

No, no. It's perfect. All right. Having that said, Andrea, thank you so much for uh giving us the insights on what you've been what you've been doing over the last uh you know you have several months at dynatrace to change um i'm sure we will have you back also i think what we have planned because you are coming from the hl coach side uh we've also planned to have a session on this transformation with some of the folks on the engineering side.

So kind of the people that you are enabling to do things differently. So we're looking forward to their perspective and then we'll see if they match, hopefully. okay yeah thanks a lot for inviting me i i really enjoyed talking to you so thanks thank you a lot thank you andrea i learned all about yeah and actually one last remark i think you said it there's a master thesis also being written based on that new model. Is this correct? Yes, that's correct. But unfortunately, it's in German. Wow. We just use Google Translate, right? Yeah, exactly. What could go wrong?

Yeah. Or a good reason to pick up Duolingo or some other app to learn German as a second or third language right and you have to learn another language that was cute

that was really good okay thank you so much thank you have a great day if anybody has any

comments or questions please tweet them at pure underscore DT on Twitter or you can email us at pureperformance at dynatrace.com. Andrea, thank you again for being on. This is very enlightening. We appreciate you sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us. And Andy, always thanks for making these all possible and being my spirit around this. So thanks everyone for listening. We love you all. Bye-bye.