A Great Devops Culture
Its goal is to shorten the system development lifecycle and ensure a continuous delivery of high quality software. While DevOps is not a cure-all, it can be applied to any part of the IT development lifecycle to foster collaboration and better results. The key is to have a team with the right mindset to help create a DevOps culture that permeates all other organizations to work together. Some of the most important ingredients of a strong DevOps culture are a high degree of collaboration, constant communication, repetition and learning from failure, and the ability of people to succeed.
Cultural practices such as information flow, collaboration, sharing responsibilities, learning from failure, and new ideas are at the core of DevOps. DevOps planning can lead to a company’s cultural change by changing the way operations, developers, and testers interact during development and delivery. Compared with organizations that use traditional software development and infrastructure management processes, using DevOps can help develop and improve products faster. DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops).
The primary goals of the DevOps methodology are to accelerate time to market, apply incremental improvements in response to a changing environment, and create a more cost-effective development process. Joseph Pellegrini, Regional CTO for PCM, Inc., explained that there are broadly two definitions of DevOps: “The broader definition, which has remained largely unchanged since the terms were introduced around 2003, is that DevOps is a set of cultural principles based on concepts of mutual competence between software development and infrastructure operations, ”began Pellegrini. The core theory of DevOps is to combine development and operations to create a one-sided team focused on common goals. How a DevOps strategy focuses on people and collaboration between teams so that people can focus on high-priority issues at any stage of the software development lifecycle without constraints.
DevOps ensures that developers get the quick feedback they need to quickly iterate and improve application code, requiring collaboration between operations engineers to design and implement application monitoring and reporting strategies. The DevOps culture values quick feedback, which can help you continually improve your development and operations team. DevOps methodologies aim to create a culture of innovation in which the entire organization can collaborate and respond quickly to market fluctuations. While continuous delivery is focused on automating software delivery processes, DevOps also focuses on organizational change to maintain close collaboration across the many functions involved.
The philosophy of continuous improvement with DevOps is realized by working on frequent but small software changes with each build iteration, rigorous testing with automated tools, and faster delivery to end users.
By collecting feedback in a timely manner, listening and solving problems, and what I call “continuous communication” about the need for change, you can simplify the transition and create a successful DevOps culture. As an example of Westrum’s generative leadership practices for a collaborative and secure DevOps culture, I shared an email that Jason Cox, director of platform and system reliability at Walt Disney Company, sent to his team on Monday morning to remind them to support Leadership, collaboration between leader and team, psychological safety and continuous improvement.
Empowerment and autonomy are critical to DevOps, and organizational changes need to be made to allow teams to self-organize around products and applications, while collaboration is encouraged and supported by management. Cultural change cannot happen without the support of high-level management, but getting started on an individual and team level with DevOps is a useful way to explore how the process can benefit other areas within the company. The comments from the professionals here offer some good advice on how to start bridging the gap between development and operations, but each organization must understand its own cultural matrix in order to make the meaningful changes required for DevOps to succeed. Implementing DevOps requires significant changes in how people work with each other and how organizations drive the cultural change needed.
DevOps is not a specific team or a specific process, it is people and culture. A DevOps culture is a culture in which stakeholders in the software development and distribution process, including the business, are focused on common goals. For the business as a whole, the DevOps culture ensures that developers and operators work together so that agile development can happen without a pile of crappy code that makes users cringe.
To meet market demands, brands are adopting a DevOps culture to simplify large-scale software development, implementation, management, and maintenance. The DevOps ecosystem is an ever-growing mix of tools, processes, structures, and culture. DevOps is ultimately a combination of culture, processes and tools, although not everyone thinks so. DevOps is just another buzzword if you don’t have the right culture.
A key feature of the DevOps culture is closer collaboration between development and operations roles. This collaboration supports some important cultural changes within teams and at the organizational level. A shared sense of responsibility is one aspect of the DevOps culture that fosters closer collaboration. In any DevOps organization, whether it’s an individual team or an entire organization, small, interdisciplinary, autonomous teams work together in development, quality assurance, and operations with shared responsibilities.
The DevOps team includes developers, operational resources, and other key and cross-functional roles built around specific services, applications, or products. The most compelling indicator of a healthy DevOps culture I have seen so far is that collaboration between teams is simple, and engineers are inspired by the deep sense of ownership of the software they distribute. With the team’s enthusiasm, flexibility, and patient respect for the process, DevOps can succeed in most organizations.
In order to realize the business value of DevOps and take advantage of opportunities in emerging markets, companies must create a DevOps culture and achieve rapid, predictable, and high-quality software development. DevOps is achieved to a large extent by combining new operation and maintenance tools and mature agile engineering practices, but this is not enough to realize the benefits of DevOps. Despite the available technology and workflow, if you do not accept the cultural shift in DevOps, the team may face conflicting goals and may not be able to achieve the true pace and perspective of DevOps. In fact, Gartner estimates that when infrastructure and operations teams try to lead DevOps initiatives without changing the culture, they fail 90% of the time.
This perpetuates the types of silos that DevOps seeks to break and prevents DevOps culture and practices from being shared and accepted by the wider organization. The fastest way to create a DevOps environment is to bring the development team together with the operations team, forcing them to collaborate and communicate more.
DevOps implementation can vary as large corporate departments have different goals, processes, tools, and even culture. A DevOps culture blurs the line between developer and operations roles and can ultimately bridge that distinction. Don’t rely on automation tools to lead your DevOps team; Jones said that it is the people who make the culture successful at HADO.