What is DevOps and Why You Should Consider it for your Organisation

Software development projects are complex and risky, involving many teams in an organisation to help ensure that the project is a success.

Product owners from the business provide the business need for the new software. Developers write new features, and testers make sure that the features written by the development team satisfy the requirements set out by the product owner. Security teams ensure that the software is secure. Operations teams make sure that environments are available and ready for the code to run on.

Whilst this has been the case for some time, why are more and more software projects being delivered over budget and late?

The reality is that in most organisations, these teams work in silos with their pressures and targets to meet. While development teams are encouraged to write new features, operations teams ensure that changes are kept to a minimum to ensure service uptime, availability, and stability.

These competing targets create natural conflicts within organisations. Requests from one team land in the ticketing systems of the other team, and with no incentives to work together, tickets sit for weeks before they are processed. The requests become just another ticket in a queue.

Whilst the development teams and operations teams fight it out over tickets, the testing and security teams are dropped into the end of the project, far too late to correct problems.

All this leads to delays and re-work, teams competing against each other, losing sight of the original business goals resulting in poor outcomes for the business, frustration and quality falling short of what organisations are capable of.

There has to be a better way to work?

In a DevOps world, project teams are cross-functional, taking expertise from each of these areas required for the project to be a success and bringing them together to work towards a common goal, delivering value to the end-user through continuous delivery of features environments with confidence.

“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is a success.” – Henry Ford

By bringing testing, security, operations teams into the delivery teams with developers, they help assist developers to become more productive and achieve better outcomes, reducing friction and ensuring that issues are highlighted early in the development process way and fixed way before those features are released, this reduces delays and improves the quality of the software produced.

DevOps take decades of lessons learned in process improvement methodologies in the manufacturing industry such a Lean and TPS (Toyota Production System), combining it with the Agile development principles to create transparent, safe and rewarding working environments to help deliver high quality software, improving business outcomes and delighting end users.