We have reached a time in software development where speed and the ability to adapt to change has become the bloodline of any software company. And since the birth of DevOps, a wave of organisations whose main focus is software development, has gone full lengths in implementing this new work environment standard to increase their productivity and the rate of their delivery. But what exactly is the DevOps culture and what does it promote? Let’s find out.
It’s All About Creating a Positive Work Culture
DevOps can be succintly defined using these descriptive terms: agile, collaborative, continuous learning. The goal of DevOps is to unite the efforts of all teams involved in producing work from its inception all the way to its post-delivery status. Its practice aims to remove communication barriers that can put a constraint on collaborative efforts between the backend and the frontend teams. DevOps improves communication channels, encourages a more collaborative environment, and fosters an environment which focuses on learning opportunities and the value of problem solving vs finger pointing, so that teams can operate on a more peaceful plane as they work together to achieve their shared and common goals. This approach is turning “war rooms” into collaborative learning environments, allowing everyone within the organisation to learn from each other’s best practices, learn from events where postive and healthy problem solving was employed to turn a sitution around, and encouraging the desire for learning for the purpose of continuous improvement and perfecting one’s work. Below are the ways in which an organisation can benefit from fostering a DevOps culture.
Continuous Learning
This encourages teams to strive to continuously improve their ways and methodologies at work, thereby resulting in better and more stable products, through the course of time. It is through continous learning that teams and individuals can develop products that keep up with the evolving needs of the consumers and the fast-paced growth and development of the tech market.
Smoother Work Flows and Streams
DevOps also aims to eliminate wastes in the production flow, following widely recognised work efficiency methods like Lean and 5s, as well as applying Kanban work visibility methods to ensure work visibility that can promote better work relationships between teams and among the inviduals within these teams. It elminates time and energy wastage in a production line, for example, where handoffs are properly timed in order to limit wait times and reduce overall leadtimes. This results in a shorter timeline, smoother work flow, more time and cost efficient value stream, and faster product delivery as well as quicker deployments. In return, organisations are able to turn these investment projects into income generating and profit earning products and services, from which the business and its employees can directly benefit from.
More Value for the Customer
DevOps improves the activities that happen from the beginning to the end of a project, thereby giving teams the ability to direct their time and energy in performing their actual task versue putting out fires here and there. As a result, teams can focus working to create better and more stable products and can send these to production within a relatively shorter amount of time. This is what gives a product its value: reliability, stability, and services that are useful to the customers.
What it can do for your Business
Business can also benefit from DevOps practices, especially when it comes to profitability. Lean methods are the underpinnings of the DevOps approach. Lean methods are crucial in the ability of an organisation to cut down on waste and invest more in quality. By reducing the amount of resources that go to waste like unnecessary features and services that offer no value to the customer, product development becomes more efficient, practical, and in tune with what customers really need in a product. On a team level, below are the things that one can expect from an environment that incorporates DevOps methods in their work practices.
Better Work Culture
Because teams are encouraged to work with one another and communicate more openly to discuss ways and means to achieve shared and common goals, it turns negative work culture around where passing the blame around and finger pointing are changed into accountability, with clearer scope of work, areas of responsibilities, and more organised team dependencies.