7 Key Elements of An Effective DevOps Culture

• By Irfan Ak
• 23-12-2021
• Technology

The pace at which technology and customer needs are evolving makes it tough for businesses to keep pace with it. Brands are expected to bring new products faster to the market and also maintain existing products, which is not easy. That is where DevOps comes into play.

What is DevOps?
According to Joseph Pellegrini, regional CTO at PCM, Inc, “DevOps is a set of cultural principles centered on the concepts of cross-fertilizing expertise between software development and infrastructure operations.DevOps is the engineering domain responsible for the design, implementation and management of CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) frameworks, which more recently has also subsumed responsibility for container design and management.”

Advantages of DevOps
It enables businesses to streamline their business operations, provides stable operating environments and ensures faster product and features delivery. When you adopt DevOps, you have more time for innovation and trying new things as compared to maintaining and fixing existing processes. That is why more and more businesses are embracing DevOps.

If you are one of those businesses that have already adopted DevOps or planning to do it in the future, then you should be familiar with key components that make a DevOps culture highly effective. In this article, you will learn about seven important elements that make up a successful DevOps culture.

7 Elements of Successful DevOps Culture
Here are seven elements that make a DevOps culture successful.

1. Collaboration
The core concept of DevOps revolves around the unification of the development and operations team into a single team that has a common objective. This would only be possible if development and operations teams communicate and collaborate with one another on a regular basis. Additionally, companies will have to align their processes, tools and people to achieve success with DevOps.

If your business doesn’t have a collaborative environment, your organization will have to go through a cultural shift to successfully implement DevOps. Instead of adopting a bottom-up approach, it should flow from top to bottom. For this, you need executive buy-ins for your initiatives. If you have the right people that can lead through this cultural shift, you are more likely to succeed with DevOps.

2. Automation
It is difficult for businesses to ensure continuous delivery while bringing newer products to the market faster. You need to have automated processes in place in order to make this a possibility. DevOps makes it easy by incorporating user feedback and speeding up the cycle. As the technology matured, we saw new tools that can help you automate and streamline your continuous delivery and continuous integration pipeline. You can even create your own automated processes if you want.

According to George Miranda, DevOps Engineer at PagerDuty, “Automation is a key step toward [CI/CD] or the ability to rapidly release new software to your customers. This includes automation of infrastructure provisioning, the building of new systems, software deployment and a gauntlet of tests to verify everything from functionality to security compliance.”

3. Responsibility
Unlike in traditional software and mobile app development where development and operations work independently, DevOps brings them together and holds them accountable. Every member of the team takes the responsibility of service. DevOps eliminates differences between development and operations and minimizes performance and efficiency bottlenecks by sharing responsibility throughout the team. Gone are the days when the development team is only responsible for creating code while the operation team’s job was to deploy that code. Now, both teams are responsible for the complete process.

4. Expertise
The software development lifecycle has multiple stages and each stage is handled by different professionals. For instance, coding is managed by developers while testing is done by testers. DevOps has completely flipped the script by involving all the team members at every stage of the process. That is why it is important that every DevOps team members have a diverse skill set. This is easier said than done. You can also ask your team members to help each other and share the responsibility to cover the skill gap present in the DevOps team.

5. Customer Needs
DevOps is not for everyone. If you are a lean startup or can act like one and innovate continuously by pivoting from strategies that are not working quickly. The primary goal should be to ensure customer satisfaction. To cope with the dynamic customer demands, you need to stay one step ahead of the curve and understand what are the biggest customer pain points. Make sure that all your automated processes are working properly so you can achieve your goal.

Leverage customer data and incorporate user feedback to make the right changes to your process so it can deliver products that can fulfill your customer needs. Focus on metrics that are important for users and your business to get a better picture. This will also help you make the right business decisions.

6. Continuous Improvement
In today’s fast-paced world, everything changes quickly. You need to adapt quickly to stay relevant. DevOps puts a lot of emphasis on bringing continuous improvements and reducing the cost while increasing efficiency. Whether it is new legislation or a shift in customer needs, you need to respond to these changes faster. Successful DevOps teams use automation and optimize their processes in order to ensure continuous delivery and you need to do the same if you want to achieve similar results.

7. Failure
Yes, you read that right. Instead of seeing failure as something bad, you should learn lessons from your failures and avoid making the same mistakes in the future. When you have to make a cultural shift and move fast, you are more likely to fail. Don’t let those failures act as a roadblock that can negatively impact your progress towards implementing DevOps in your organization. Review and learn from your past mistakes to improve in the future. This also develops a learning culture in your organization.

Which are the key components of a successful DevOps culture in your opinion? Share it with us in the comments section below.