DevOps is the new buzzword for IT. It arose out of the need to resolve issues with delivery of software as development processes adopted agile approaches. But what exactly is DevOps?
DevOps is a philosophy which advocates close collaboration between development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) with a goal of delivering value to the end-user with improved agility and quality. Historically developers and IT operations were separated in their own silos. While development focused on getting features out quickly, the IT operations team were focused on maintaining the stability and performance of the systems. With little visibility into each others' work and conflicting / opposing priorities, there was little alignment on the context and the ultimate value provided to business. In the DevOps culture, there is increased collaboration and feedback, reduced silos and shared responsibility which improves outcomes. In essence, DevOps is the extension of agile values beyong development to IT Operations and collaborating together. Thus the portmanteau word: Development + IT Operations = DevOps
How does this work in practice ? Most commonly this involves a set of practices to improve the process of development and deployment of software:
- breaking silos between development and IT Operations to improve collaboration and feedback. Examples: creating a single cross-functional team including both dev and IT Ops, using kanban boards to ensure visibility of all work including unplanned work.
- using technology to reduce inefficiencies by automating integration and deployment activities. This enables more frequent builds, faster testing, and swift identification of failures so that they are fixed quickly
- use of a distributed version control system as source code repository e.g. Git
- automated continuous integration pipeline that tests, packages and delivers releases
As with agile retrospectives, DevOps too includes an element of continuous experimentation and learning. As with agile values, adopting DevOps is not just a set of methods but a culture and mindset. DevOps developed to reduce the friction between the dev and Ops teams, and it is exactly by building high-trust collaborative teams which fosters learning and innovation and reduces finger-pointing/blame-games that we get the most out of it.
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