DevOps: The bridge between development and operations

DevOps. What it is and how it helps.
"DevOps" is booming: the number of conferences on DevOps is increasing. DevOps is populating specialist journals. Book publications on DevOps are on the rise. We believe that there is more to it than just hype and that DevOps is part of agilization. Here's why.

DevOps is a term made up of the initial letters of development and operations. It describes the idea of combining the employees who work on a sales product or a marketable service into one team. Ideally, this team is responsible for the product or service from A to Z. The DevOps team brings together all the skills and knowledge required from product management to maintaining the creation of the product or service.

DevOps transforms the traditional functional division of labor (product management, development, operations, ...) into a work grouping oriented towards saleable products. DevOps cuts the organization horizontally instead of vertically. DevOps is therefore the continuation of the consistent customer and solution orientation that often began with Scrum. Agile teams often encounter working methods in adjacent parts of the organization that hinder their own agile development. The integration of operations into the agile development teams is therefore a logical step.

Now, obvious does not mean that it is easy to combine development and operations. In addition to the fundamentally different working methods of the two functions that now need to be integrated, the mental rift that has developed over years of separation also needs to be overcome. This means that a very plausible organizational step - merging development and operations - can become a real cultural challenge that needs to be well planned and managed.

Organizations grow into agility in different ways depending on the product and market. If several agile development teams are working on a joint product, then vertical scaling approaches for coordinating the teams are the next step.

If, on the other hand, agile development teams are working on unrelated products, then integration along the value chain is the next logical step. In our view, there is no way around DevOps for these organizations. The innovative power and customer focus that arise from a self-organized team with product responsibility are difficult to achieve with other forms of organization.

This text is taken from the wibas customer magazine.