Like agile before it, people are quickly adopting and making great use of DevOps. A fresh methodology meant to integrate multiple functions—from development to operations—within the same cycle, DevOps stresses communication, automation, and a strong sense of cooperation within a software team.
Yet, while it can be argued that agile spawned DevOps, some software veterans argue that it’s DevOps that’s actually pushing agile. Jeff Payne, CEO and founder of Coveros, pondered this thought during a recent interview with StickyMinds.
Today, it's kind of funny, DevOps is kind of driving agile. We're seeing a lot more people coming to us because they're trying to figure out how to tackle DevOps, and once they get involved in that, what they realize is you really can't tackle it unless you're doing things in a fundamentally different way, building your application in very short increments so you can continuously integrate, automating your tests at all levels so that you can regression test and find bugs during the whole process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They are, to me, intimately tied. It's funny, though, that DevOps really seems to be driving now the move to agile instead of the other way around.
And like agile, DevOps can’t just be introduced into a pre-existing environment and have a positive impact right away. These types of methodologies take a full culture change in order to produce real, tangible benefits to both individual teams and an organization as a whole.
But plenty of companies making the transition aren’t considering this.
“Most organizations aren't doing that. They're trying to paste DevOps into the organization without changing the way the organization works and communicates,” Payne explained. “Fundamentally, that's not going to work. You've got to figure out how to get everybody working together and you've got to figure out how to align incentives and people's jobs so that they know it's their responsibility to do that.”
Quicker, easier, better development through the power of collaboration is the goal. To be able to get to that point, though, takes a sound understanding of your company’s culture, as well as the patience to integrate your specific brand of DevOps into the team.
Agile and DevOps can at times look like a perfect pair, but today, the methodology doing the driving might actually be DevOps, not its predecessor.
