DevOps: Culture that promotes collaboration between Development and Operations Team

The agile approach has broken down some of the silos of the software development process. Software Deployment, operations, and maintenance are other activities which have suffered a similar separation from the rest of the software development process. The DevOps movement is focused on removing these silos and encouraging collaboration between development and operations.

The traditional problem between developers and operations is the conflicting goal that they have in order to achieve the organization’s objective. Dev needs to build and release new features fast in order to support user’s need, while Ops needs to ensure system reliability by minimizing changes to the system.

DevOps intended to fix this so that both roles are working together instead of being odd at each other. To better understand the culture, we need to look first what are the responsibilities of both roles.

Devs

Application developers have a number of responsibilities that fall on their shoulders. These have to do with managing the application lifecycle, knowledge of certain principles in coding, support and collaboration efforts.

• Coding and Design
• Application Management
• Troubleshooting and Debugging Applications
• Project Management, Collaboration, Communication
• Customer Feedback

Ops

The role of Operations can mean a lot of things and even different things to different people.

• IT buying
• Installation of server hardware and OS
• Configuration of servers, networks, storage, etc…
• Monitoring of servers
• Respond to outages
• IT security
• Managing phone systems, network
• Change control
• Backup and disaster recovery planning
• Manage active directory
• Asset tracking

There are certain responsibilities where Dev and Ops duties combine and that’s where they need DevOps combined. Software deployments and Application support are the two main shared responsibilities.

DevOps incorporates a new collaborative culture that embraces numerous practices combined together for a continuous software development methodology that places significant emphasis on feedback loops, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Organize willing to adopt DevOps should see it as a culture and need to consider involving everyone that is responsible for the delivery of value to end-users. It is simply about creating a holistic mindset and collaborative work ethic from all of the departments involved in the software delivery lifecycle.

It is simply about creating a holistic mindset and collaborative work ethic from all of the departments involved in the software delivery lifecycle.

Traditional software development often can’t keep up with today’s fast-moving digital world. DevOps helps companies accelerate software development and improve software quality. In the past, the software was often thrown over to infrastructure and operations for deployment and support. Resolving issues required numerous rounds of iterations between multiple groups.

With DevOps, software developers, infrastructure administrators, quality assurance and operations professionals collaborate early and often to anticipate potential problems and proactively incorporate feedback throughout the development cycle using  DevOps Platform.

With continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring of applications, we can:

• Respond to the market faster and build engaging user experiences.
• Scale DevOps successfully without disrupting your business.
• Build a startup culture that brings business, development, and operations together.
• Centralized statistics for real-time project status and reporting
• Automated quality assurance and delivery
• Seamless integration of DevOps engineering and Agile project management needs

Benefits of DevOps

• Speed – Move at high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results.
• Rapid Delivery – Increase the frequency and pace of releases so you can innovate and improve your product faster. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage.
• Reliability – Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end users.
• Scale – Operate and manage your infrastructure and development processes at scale. Automation and consistency help you manage complex or changing systems efficiently and with reduced risk.

DevOps is not a team or a method – it is a culture that needs to pervade everyone in the organization. Everyone – from QA to PMOs, not just developers and ops – needs to embrace DevOps values, making sure that value is being delivered continually to their end-users.