I mentioned a slide deck by Stephen Nelsen-Smith making rounds on Twitter talking about "How NOT to do Devops". Worth walking through the slides, as some of the discussions relate to real pitfalls of agile adoption as well: https://speakerdeck.com/atalanta/how-not-to-do-devops.
Also mentioned some virtualization/development stuff worth checking out. First, if you are not using Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com), you should be. Vagrant allows you to setup base VMs and setup scripts to get a developer workstation up and running more quickly, and also allows you to quickly iterate on building configuration management scripts. See these slides from the creator, Mitchell Hashimoto, about this very subject: https://speakerdeck.com/mitchellh/develop-and-test-configuration-management-scripts-with-vagrant.
Lastly, if folks are interested in automating base VM builds, Mitchell Hashimoto recently release Packer (http://packer.io), which helps create automation around their construction for multiple platforms. Packer is a pre-1.0 open source project, but already has support for VirtualBox, various VMware desktop products, AWS, and more; along with provisioning support via shell scripts, Chef, Puppet, Salt, and others. And, in shameless self promotion mode, I was added as a core committer early last week and plan to add more automations support for building VMware VMs on a desktop and uploading them to ESXi/vSphere servers.