What is DevOps?
DevOps aims for a simple, yet important goal to make IT easier, faster and cheaper, to provide more value faster to the business/consumer/ user.
DevOps, a philosophy, culture, and movement that arose from an urgent need for better alignment, collaboration, and empathy between IT Development and IT Operations teams or departments, is now increasingly used to denote precisely the aforementioned key ingredients that constitute the New IT wave.
For us, enterprise-wide DevOps stands for rethinking traditional IT practices and capabilities, including a product, process, and people perspective. DevOps is the ultimate search for flow in the delivery of IT services.
“DevOps isn’t a thing. It’s not a product, standard,specification, framework or job title. DevOps is about experiences, ideas, and culture. It’s about the close communication and collaboration between IT operations and development, and how they can improve the products and services that they produce by thinking differently about how they work together, using a new mentality.”
– Gareth Daine, DevOps Evangelist
Software Development Methodology
Waterfall
Traditional (1970) structured, rigid software development methodology
Think -Silo’s, software developed as one single project -change is difficult
Agile
Agile (2001) methodology known for flexibility and fast development of software
Think – Developers develop software super fast but the agility stopped at the door of production
DevOps
DevOps (2009) collaboration between development and production professionals through all stages of a product or service lifecycle
Think – High-performing teams that meet to metrics for successful digital business models
Why DevOps matters?
Digital Business Models are driving IT transformational Change. Old Waterfall approaches are being abandoned as Enterprises ask the question – What does DevOps mean for my IT organization, are my people ready for DevOps, and do my teams have the right skills to work in an Agile / DevOps environment.
Adopting DevOps concepts and principles requires a deep cultural and organizational change for organizations. Moving from siloed, waterfall driven systems to adopting Agile and Scrum practices first, and DevOps second means changing behavior. Old practices, ways of working make way for new approaches to doing work.
Why is it so hard to change the culture in an organization DevOps requires deep cultural and organizational change. That means changing behavior – a lot. It means throwing out decades of embedded explicit and implicit practices. You have to tell experienced senior people accustomed to running things that much of what they know and do every day has become obsolete. Learn More
Our vision on DevOps
What is your most valuable resource? People
DASA was founded to help individuals and teams to build the confidence within so that they can work effectively in a DevOps team.
DASA provides guidance that helps professionals and organizations make the journey into DevOps. We do this by offering examples of successful transitions, we bring people together to talk about our unique team based approach to DevOps, and we develop and offer thought leadership.
The guidance DASA provides is best captured in the DASA Team Competence Model. The Competence Model represents DASA’s vision on DevOps, and is used as the guiding light for any DevOps transformational journey. In our vision IT professionals are transforming from specialists to more generic, T-shaped professionals. Anyone in the team can roughly do the job of another. These professionals take part in teams with end-to-end responsibility for the product they serve. Teams are the driving force behind DevOps success for organizations.
“a T-shaped employee, is an individual who has in-depth knowledge and skills in a particular area of specialization, along with and the desire and ability to make connections across disciplines. The horizontal bar of the T symbolizes a breadth of general knowledge and soft skills, while the vertical stem of the T symbolizes the depth of hard technical skills. Essentially, a T-shaped individual is both a niche-topic specialist and a generalist with people skills.”
In order to create ultimate flow within a high performing team it is essential to realize that a balanced set of capabilities is required within a team. The distribution of these skills and knowledge capabilities may be different per team, however, each team will need to ensure that the complete mix of required skills is present in a team.
Are you ready for DevOps?
Does your team has the right set of skills and capabilities to achieve high-performance levels?
Learn more about DASA Team Competence Model