Continuous Improvement is the foundation of the DevOps Culture

The tech-embedded world is full of hype, and the noise is loudest here in the Tech Sector. The latest?news from the void?says that DevOps is dead. That is a confusing statement, given the best?research?we have continues to indicate adopting DevOps is highly correlated with successful business outcomes.

These two perspectives seem to contradict. You see, the folks publishing the news of DevOps's untimely demise and those heralding DevOps as the savior of the software engineering businesses aren't talking about the same thing.?

It turns out the folks preparing for the wake have mistaken some of the outcomes of DevOps culture with DevOps itself. They believe that practices like having software developers operate the services they create are DevOps. They also think that because these practices are falling out of favor with developers in today's hyper-competitive job market, businesses will be getting off the DevOps train permanently.

DevOps is itself the outcome of the agile philosophy of continuous improvement. We realized more than a decade ago that having the people who write the software and those who operate the software at war with each other was a horrible idea. At the least, the two sides need to hold common goals for a technology business to be successful.?

Every other modern software engineering practice of the DevOps era has come about because of that same philosophy of continuous improvement.

In DevOps, we review where we are, decide where we want to go, try something to get closer to the goal, measure our results, and repeat the process.?

It's an abstract and complex concept, which makes it hard to understand if this isn't something you have lived through before, so let me try to simplify it with a story.

Story Time

You are the CTO for MicroCo, and your glorious technology division has a full complement of eight people, including yourself. Your product has a sound footing in your target market, and your roadmap is full of excellent additions that will delight your current and future customers.?

As MicroCo has become successful, highly determined competitors have entered the market and are developing their features at a pace you can't match.

You and the MicroCo CEO realize your team needs to deliver your roadmap on an accelerated timeline to maintain your market lead. To develop more quickly, you could hire, but the business fundamentals can't currently support that. You could impose unreasonable output expectations on your team, but that can only improve the delivery rate for a short time and risks decreased quality, developer burnout, and attention.?

The next place you look is at your processes. You find that your current build, deploy, and test process requires about 85 hours of developer time each week. You figure there has got to be a way to reduce that time, so you have two of your developers' string together each step via automation. In other words, you implement CI/CD. When the project is complete, you have reduced the time your developers spend on this process by 64 hours which increases your delivery velocity substantially.

With the data in hand, you now get back to the CEO and decide if the increased velocity is enough to maintain your dominant market position. If it is not, you look for another place to improve things to increase the speed of roadmap delivery. If it is, you decide what else can be improved to deliver value to your clients.

In this story, my friend, you just lived the DevOps dream! Not by getting developers to create a CI/CD pipeline but by completing a continuous improvement cycle.

The nature of existence is change. To survive, we must be adaptable, and continuous improvement provides a framework to evolve ourselves, our processes, our tools, and our business.?

If it makes people feel better to bury DevOps in the annals of history, so be it, but we won't give up everything we learned along the way, and we won't stop improving.

So what do you think? Should we stop calling the art of continuous improvement DevOps? Should we not care what reverberates in the Tech industry's echo chamber? Something else, perhaps?

Until next week, I wish you the best.

Robert