What is Meant by DevOps Mindset
DevOps mindset is all about working as a collaborative teams — Development & Operations together. It emphasizes automation of software development, testing and release processes. This typically involves more than one team; development and operations to mention the least. Depending on how complicated the release process is it can involve other teams as well at least peripherally.
The Need for Team Collaboration
At the outset, this implies stronger collaboration between teams. This is the mindset that all teams need to adopt for successful implementation. No team can afford to work in silo and ‘throw the problem’ over the wall to the other team so to speak. Any problem in DevOps will likely impact all teams.
Improving Speed to Market
The objective of DevOps is improving speed to market of any changes in software. This mean using a lot of tools to automate processes. This typically involves implementing lot of technical solutions like continuous integration, version control, build automation etc. All DevOps engineers and managers need to understand the benefit and limitation of each of the technical solutions involved. Hence the mindset needs to be about understanding how these technical solutions fit into the processes and how to improve or change current processes to make effective use of these tools. It does require certain level of technical expertise on part of managers as well as engineers.
Key Principles in DevOps
Open Information Sharing
Teams implementing DevOps have to have a mindset of sharing information openly. Sharing information does not only mean sharing user manuals of products but also do a regular review of progress as a larger team and share lessons learnt. It is important that all team members see that this is being done very actively as this is what brings in required level of transparency.
Measuring Progress with Standardized Metrics<
Apart from sharing, team need to measure their progress against standardized metrics. For e.g. development team needs to show lines of code developed or testing team needs to show number of test cases automated. Measurement is key to progress as any lessons learnt against metrics that have been achieved or could not be achieved can be shared only if there are clear goals and means to measure progress against those goals.
Aligning Team Goals with Organizational Objectives
One of key factors of success to try and replace individual team goals with organizational goals. This helps removing the mindset of teams working in silos and bring the teams together to work in collaboration. In turn it helps in developing robust solutions that are scalable and can be implemented elsewhere i.e. repeatable. Robust solutions typically last much longer even if business conditions change hence it is critical that mindset be made to develop solutions for the long term.
Developing Skills and Talent within DevOps Teams
An organization wanting to implement DevOps must have the mindset of developing skills and talent. One of the best ways is to have teams, cross-train each other for e.g. developers can be trained to see how QA teams work and how do they do their testing and vice versa. At the very least this helps in expectation setting at the ground level where each developer knows what to expect from a QA team member and vice versa. This is also part of continuous learning mindset that teams need to adopt in order to be successful at implementing DevOps.
Conclusion
In other words, as shown above, a significant shift in mindset is needed for any organizations to be successful in implementing DevOps.
