What is DevOps Culture?

DevOps entails shared responsibilities. Development and operations staff should both be responsible for the success or failure of a product. Developers are expected to do more than just build and hand off to operations — they are expected to share the responsibility of overseeing a product through the entire course of its lifetime, adopting a "you build it, you run it" mentality. They test and operate software and collaborate more with QA and IT Ops. When they understand the challenges faced by operations, they are more likely to simplify deployment and maintenance. Likewise, when operations understand the system’s business goals, they can work with developers to help define the operational needs of a system and adopt automation tools. 

Autonomous teams are another important aspect of DevOps. For the development and operations teams to collaborate effectively, they need to make decisions and implement changes without a cumbersome and lengthy approval process. This involves handing over trust to teams and establishing an environment where there is no fear of failure. These teams should have the right processes and tools in place to make decisions faster and easier, for each level of risk to the customer. 

For example, a typical development workflow might require engagement from several contributors on different teams to deploy code changes. The developer makes a code change and pushes it to a source control repository, a build engineer builds and deploys the code to a test environment, a product owner updates the status of the work in an issue tracking tool, etc. An autonomous team will take advantage of tools that automate these processes, so that pushing new code triggers the building and deployment of a new feature into a test environment and the issue tracking tool is updated automatically. 

For example, a team is handicapped by requirements like having to open a ticket with a separate operations team to make a trivial infrastructure change, such as a new DNS entry. A task that should take seconds to complete ends up taking days or weeks to satisfy. An autonomous team has the ability to implement such changes themselves, whether by having an individual on the team who has the correct skills and experience, or by having access to self-service tooling.

A DevOps team culture values fast feedback that can help with continuous improvement of a unified development and operations team. In an environment where the development and operations teams are in isolated silos, feedback about the performance and stability of application software in production is often slow to make it back to the development team, if it makes it at all. DevOps ensures that developers get the fast feedback they need to rapidly iterate and improve on application code by requiring collaboration between operations folks in designing and implementing application monitoring and reporting strategies. For example, any sufficiently capable continuous integration tool will enable automated build and testing of new code pushes and provide the developer with immediate feedback on the quality of their code. 

Automation is essential to DevOps culture, since it allows great collaboration and frees up resources. Automating and integrating the processes between software development and IT teams helps them to build, test, and release software faster and more reliably.

The most obvious and impactful benefit of embracing a DevOps culture is streamlined, frequent, and high-quality software releases. This not only increases company performance, but also employee satisfaction. 

A DevOps culture fosters high levels of trust and collaboration, results in higher quality decision making, and even higher levels of job satisfaction, according to the book “Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.”

Embracing a DevOps culture is key to building a high-performing engineering organization without sacrificing employee contentment. It’s a win-win. For an engineer there is nothing like the feeling of frequently and easily deploying and running stable, high-performing software that makes its users happy, and for executives the improved business outcomes are a hit.

Fully embracing a DevOps culture usually requires individuals and teams to make significant changes to how they work, and therefore requires buy-in at the highest levels of the organization. 

A grassroots effort can be, and often is, an important starting point for getting management and executive-level buy-in for a DevOps transformation. Often the most compelling argument in favor of broader DevOps adoption is when a few individuals or small teams adopt a DevOps approach and begin demonstrating success.    

The high levels of autonomy and trust that are typical in a DevOps culture can be difficult to cultivate if there is a history of conflict between any of the individuals or teams involved. The more siloed the teams were before attempting to adopt a DevOps approach, the harder it will be to build connections.

Change is hard. Even in environments where there is a high level of harmony between the existing individuals and teams, if the benefits of change aren't clearly articulated and understood, it can be difficult to drive acceptance and willingness to put in the work.  

Understandably, organizations with a strong engineering mindset often jump immediately to tools and technologies to solve business challenges. Yes, there are tools and technologies that can help your organization transition to a DevOps approach. But changing tools and technologies without changing the culture is often called “cargo-cult DevOps” since it changes the facade without addressing the weakness in the foundation.

Developers have been chasing the dream of delivering software more frequently, with less effort, and fewer bugs for decades. Now, the tools and practices to make this a reality are finally here. 

Atlassian found that organizations practicing DevOps say they ship higher quality deliverables (61%), with increased deployment frequency and faster time to market (49%). And it’s not just organizations who reap the benefits, practitioners say they’ve learned new skills (78%) and received a raise (48%). 

Cultivating a DevOps culture can be challenging, but the rewards in increased satisfaction for developers, managers, and customers alike are worth it.

Are you looking to improve your DevOps culture? Start with the Service Team Health Monitor. Also, practice communicating, collaborating, and brainstorming with colleagues with the Top 4 Plays for Building a DevOps Culture.