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DEVOPS – hype or necessity?

October 16th, 2016

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For me DEVOPS is the combination of a lot of best practices of different IT domains such as Agile principles, Application Lifecycle Management processes. There is no “one fits all” solution to be implemented and it’s really dependent on the organization. The end goal of DEVOPS is to reduce “time to market” and improve the quality of the released product. There are, of course, always quick wins every organization should have that might have to be put in place and the best option is to identify what is going on in the organization right now. Many companies start with buying and implementing new tools in order to get their performance improvements but often this doesn’t end well for several reasons. In most cases tools introduce standard processes and, with a default implementation or supported by a vendor consultant, the new processes will not be aligned with the procedures and processes of your organization. This will lead to frustration in the end-user community and the result will be an even worse performance. A much better approach is to first document the value-stream map for your product. The value-stream map tells you the story of your product (or a feature) lifecycle from conception till release in production. Based on my experience, two main tracks are really key in a DEVOPS program:
Automate as much as possible.
The value-stream map can be used to identify the processes that can be automated to increase the velocity and quality of the execution
Collaboration within the teams
Not only is collaboration between Development and Operations as the acronym DEVOPS would suggest required, but so too is collaboration between all the teams involved in the product delivery. Stakeholders, representatives from the business, development and testing, operations people, etc. are all responsible for delivering the product with speed and with high quality. So, if you ask me, if DEVOPS is required the answer is YES, but adapted to your organization. I do not believe that you have to try to deliver 10 times a day as some companies do but a collaborated automated delivery process is definitely a must.
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