Defining the DevOps Approach

According to Ken Mugrage, the Chief Technology Officer at Thoughtworks, an American Technology Consultancy, DevOps is: "A culture where people, regardless of title or background, work together to imagine, develop, deploy, and operate a system". Ken Mugrage

Many organizations develop and run products separately with separate teams, which is known as running products in information "silos". Both have conflicting views on the production environment and on how to measure success:

This is an example of standard conflicts between Development and Operations silos inside an organization, each of which acts on conflicting goals and different understandings of success:

• The development team strives to rapidly propagate its changes to production and end users, as it might be measured by the number of new features and services and as it seeks end-user feedback.
• At the same time, the operations team might do their best to keep the scenario as stable as possible - as outages would endanger their team's goals.
• Here, development and operations are just the two key representatives of all the roles contributing to product's success by contributing to its value stream. In addition, you often find experts from other areas directly involved, such as quality assurance managers (QA), user assistants (UA), user experience experts (UX), and product managers (PM).

The biggest challenges do not lie within the silos, but between them. Different silos might metaphorically speak different languages (that is, use different terms and bring a different context) and have different goals, meaning that they lack a shared definition of "done". That might lead to misunderstandings between each silo.

DevOps is an organizational approach that rejects the creation of silos by forming cross-functional, autonomous teams. This means teams are composed of members who directly impact the creation and implementation of a specific product. 

This would end up in a transformation similar to the example in the following video animation:

This cross-functional team has the following characteristics:

• Efficient and direct communication using a mutual language.
• Common goals and principles.
• A common definition of project completion.

These characteristics ensure that any changes to a project are standardized, commonly understood by the team, and the product is functional at the market scale.

Going back to the Ken Mugrage definition, explore below two important features:

DevOps is a cultural approach where organizations establish an autonomous and trustful work culture with teams with shared goals that can benefit from a positive failure culture. So, DevOps is not a product you can buy and implement; it is a cultural movement and approach. To adopt it, you start an incremental journey and must improve continuously. Although being first and foremost a cultural approach, tools will nevertheless ease and power your transition and help to drive your continuous journey to implement, live, and evolve critical practices of DevOps.

This feature stresses again the importance of cross-functional teams, where experts with different backgrounds work towards a common goal with a shared understanding of the holistic product and its environment. Cross-functional teams involve all contributors who directly work along a product's value stream.

You can now describe DevOps, its definition and its purpose in creating cross-functional teams that work towards better products.

What is DevOps - Explained | New Relic