DevOps, the latest buzzword to start a discussion, whether it`s in the board room or a chit chat over coffee. But what is DevOps? Is it already applied in your company, how does it differ from the current ways of working? Things to keep in mind when facing the question “are we doing DevOps”
Especially in agile driven organisations this seemingly easy question becomes tricky to answer when starting to think about it. This may be due to the similarities these two software development methodologies have in common. For example, delivering software in a fast and safe manner, emphasising on a continuous flow. However, for once let`s focus on the differences, to better answer the question at hand.
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DevOps |
Agile |
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Value |
Sustainability of Product/Service merged with fast delivery |
Product development, Catering to ad-hoc changes |
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Focus |
Continuous delivery of a service (availability, code changes, end-to-end engineering) |
Delivering product or service increments |
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Tools |
Ansible, Jenkins, Splunk, Prometheus, GitLab |
Jira, Asana, Slack, Teams, Basecamp |
“Deployments aren’t a part of DevOps”
This is a recent statement from one of my colleagues, which left me a little startled. In fact, deployments are a great example to evaluate if you are working in a DevOps led set up. First, question the frequency of deployments made to production. While in an agile set up this usually happens on a fixed schedule e.g. in scrum after a sprint, DevOps on the other hand allows for deployments several times in a day. Secondly, question how the code is deployed in production. DevOps aims for continuous deployments, which is the end-to-end automation of building, testing and deploying code to production. On the contrary agile doesn’t focus on how the code gets into production, the most common form you will come across is continuous delivery. Which requires at least one manual step and usually several business approvals.
There is no black or white in DevOps
This might lead to the conclusion that if you do not have continuous deployments implemented for your services, your organisation is not doing DevOps. Please be aware that DevOps is not a single action that is done or not done, but rather a construct founded on DevOps practices, principles on how we work, team set-up and mindset. Therefore chances are rather high that the question of „are we doing DevOps“ can almost always be answered with a yes. Example of this is in the below charts. I asked the transformation managers in my company, if they could name at least one DevOps practice. A little over 50% could not or were not sure about it. When asked if they have any of the practices applied in their project, only 2% answered with a no or not sure. Therefore it is rather a question of how advanced an organisation is when it comes to DevOps. To get a first feel on where your organisation stands today, start reading Accelerate.
Investing in DevOps does not equal abandoning agile
It seems to be a common assumption across business stakeholders, that working and focusing on a more mature DevOps set up, automatically means abandoning the agile methodologies. This perception is particularly perilous as the funding and support for DevOps initiatives usually has to be backed by this exact group. Furthermore, the transformation to agile might just have been concluded, so bringing up DevOps can be seen as a direct attack on their decision and work. Therefore it is of the upmost importance to clarify the perception that it is either one or the other, the very moment this topic comes up. As quite the opposite is the case. While agile focuses on when we do what work, DevOps focus is on how we do that work. Conclusively, DevOps might just be the missing tetris stone to score with an agile set up. Dare to play!
