DevOps: 5 Signs Enterprises Need to Unite the Dev and Ops Camps

by Darryl K. Taft

A defect found by a customer in production can be 1,000 times more expensive to fix. But when there is a hard deadline looming, the application often gets thrown over the wall into production, no matter how incomplete the testing.

And you never have everything. One team waits for code being built by a second team, which is waiting on a third, which is waiting on the first. Or developers and testers need access to the production environment, available for two hours a week with data they can’t touch. The results? Hurry up and wait. Then take a guess on whether the code will work as designed when it goes into production.

Because Ops, Dev and Testing are in different groups and use different systems to manage their environments, the feedback loop that should be in place between Ops and Dev breaks down. Code is just thrown over the wall to Ops, and the production requirements are never communicated to Dev.

Agile development speeds software development. But Dev alone doesn’t get the app into the hands of the customer. Because Ops often hasn’t been involved in development and doesn’t understand what is needed, there is a lot of trial and error in deploying to production, wasting time. And if your software release isn’t automated, it makes getting a new app into production that much slower and error-prone.

If things go wrong, does everyone scramble to show that it was someone else’s fault? DevOps is all about collaborating and cooperating as a team, and pointing fingers is poisonous to a collaborative working environment.