According to The Register (UK), employers have been doing DevOps wrong for the past decade. Instead of serving as a term for a job title, software tool, or a team name,” DevOps is actually “a set of practices that encourage continuous integration into production,” Brian Guthrie, director of engineering at Slice, told The Register.
The concept of DevOps was born from “the necessity of operating web services like Google at a gargantuan scale” – web services of this size require automation, rather than depending on a small handful of commands and a site reload. Accomplishing this type of automation starts with a collaborate mindset, The Register says, where operations employees trust product developers to deploy code, and product developers don’t question the way operations needs code to be deployed. The service’s stability and the experience it offers is a complete version of the product, rather than just a list of features.
Related: Infographic Boils Down the Key Uses of a DevOps Toolchain
What decision makers need to know:
The Register says that employers that have their DevOps culture “backwards” can fix their mistakes. One step employers can take in shifting their DevOps culture is by implementing small, gradual changes, including shared knowledge and feedback, and mutual respect. This change should move towards the service’s performance and stability – ultimately, how to alter the way the company’s software is developed.
A second step is by encouraging operations employees to measure every aspect of the service, including the time it takes to market a service’s features to when a customer can actually use it. This helps employees evaluate and fine-tune the effort it takes them to deliver the software.
The Register suggests a final step that can help an employer change its DevOps culture is by kickstarting a process. Implementing a process enables key players to work together and continually improve the workflow of moving the service from inception to completion. This will also help employer identify bottlenecks in their workflow, and collaborate to clear the blockage. The process will also serve as a reminder to employers that DevOps itself is something that employees can help improve over time, rather than something they can buy or hire.
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