Additional Considerations for DevOps

To gather insights on the state of the DevOps movement in 2017, we talked to 16 executives from 14 companies who are implementing DevOps in their own organization and/or providing DevOps solutions to other organizations.

Here's what they told us when we asked, "What have I failed to ask that you think we need to consider with regards to DevOps?" 

Why do companies adopt a DevOps methodology? What is the pain point– lead time, cost efficiency? What is the one metric the business is trying to improve with DevOps?

There needs to be a discussion around the security aspects of DevOps.. Security is a huge piece of DevOps moving from development to production. Where are the credentials stored? How secure is access to the app as it is being deployed? Are the credentials in the container rather than outside the container?

Survey of 100 developers askedhow much time they spend waiting (developers, 12 hours per week and QA, 20 hours per week). Urban Science automating it pipeline saved 22,000 man hours per year, or 22 people.

It's important to talk about whether DevOps involves adding new staff or changing the org chart. DevOps should not be an individual's role or responsibility; it needs to be a way of thinking and set of behaviors that every team member adopts. Assigning DevOps to one person generally means you don't understand DevOps and won't succeed in adopting it. That said, it can make sense to hire or assign someone as the lead person for implementing DevOps as long as everyone clearly understands that that's a temporary role that will exist only during the adoption phase.

Define what those changes look like for your organization. Activities and processes of DevOps – gates, pipeline – change what they look like as you move from Waterfall to Agile to DevOps. 

Is there a mature set of operator tools? What tools does operations use? How are operations providing feedback to developers? What is operations doing so developers know what they need to improve?

What trends are you seeing in the marketplace? We’re seeing a growth in JavaScript as the universal scripting language; is this a function of DevOps driving use? Move from DOM to shadow DOM causing problems with Selenium version 3.0?

To be successful we need to listen to operations as well, going beyond the tools, to understand what’s important. DevOps is driven by developers and the tools developers like. 

It’s important to understand thatDevOps is not a product, it’s an implementation of a manufacturing process that relates to technology. DevOps principles are applicable throughout industry. This reduces uncertainty and improves the efficiency of process management.

How does DevOps extend beyond people doing implementation to the rest of the organization? How do other stakeholders view DevOps?

Is there anything we've left out of this series of articles on DevOps you think we need to cover?

By the way, here's who we spoke to! 

1. Michael Schmidt, Senior Director, Automic

2. Amit Ashbel, Director of Product Marketing and Cyber Security Evangelist, Checkmarx 

3. Sacha Labourey, CEO and Founder, CloudBees

4. Samer Fallouh, V.P. Engineering, Dialexa

5. Andrew Turner, Senior Architect, Dialexa

6. Andreas Grabner, Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

7. Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud 

8. Job von der Voort, V.P. of Product, GitLab 

9. Charles Kendrick, CTO, Isomorphic Software 

10. Craig Lurey, CTO and Co-Founder, Keeper Security 

11. Josh Atwell, Developer Advocate, NetApp SolidFire

12.  Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali

13.  Joe Alfaro, V.P. of Engineering, Sauce Labs 

14. Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager Testing, SmartBear Software 

15. Harsh Upreti, Product Marketing Manager API, SmartBear Software 

16. Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate, Splunk