Debunking the Top Myths About DevOps

by Darryl K. Taft

To hear some tell it, DevOps can only be understood by a new breed of blended IT professional: a “silo-busting” individual using the latest tools.

A rigid culture and a “one skill in one box” organizational structure restrict people’s rounded set of skills from being fully utilized.

Review the untapped skills of your current employees. Before scouring for DevOps talent, look for ops professionals who think like coders, and coders who understand the need for resilience.

Often, those championing DevOps claim that ITIL, COBIT and a balanced scorecard no longer have a place and should be discarded.

Any set of best practices or methodologies will accelerate and improve your IT services. Don’t obsess about where the methodologies compete, but think instead how they can complement each other.

There’s a lot of really good technical material written on DevOps, with many new terms to consider—like infrastructure-as-code and anti-fragile—all supported by a new range of products and techniques.

Meeting customer expectations is the No. 1 priority. Use customer feedback to test assumptions. Be prepared to change methods for project planning, product management, funding and implementation.

Remove physical constraints and bottlenecks that interrupt the flow of value to customers. Automate frequent release cycles. More releases mean more business, not more technical headaches.

Many organizations argue that the principles of DevOps don’t apply because they’ve outsourced operations or don’t have an app dev function. After all, what value could continuous change bring to an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” world?

Many sneaker companies, for example, are expanding beyond simply selling sneakers—they now sell a fitness experience (wearable devices) that depends on software.

It’s really about being a business practitioner and embracing techniques such as experimentation, iterative and incremental design, and above all else—learning from failure.

With so much hype, it’s easy to start drinking the DevOps Kool-Aid.

The reality is that the success rate for development projects hasn’t improved much in 20 years. If your operations team gets rewarded for stopping application releases, then no amount of agile development will help. Likewise, it won’t help if your developers won’t leave the office to meet customers. DevOps is about five things: people, people, people, people and people.

If you are ready to move from myth to reality with DevOps, download the ebooklet Dysfunction Junction – A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Started with DevOps at www.ca.com/devops-ebook.