DevOps Simplified Synergy DevOps: (Part 3 - When)

Part 1 of this White Paper discussed the “What” in DevOps. Part 2 dealt with “Why”. Part 3 is all about “When” to DevOps.

WHEN to “DevOps”?

The best time to start speaking and planning around DevOps is now. It has never been a greater time with such momentum for DevOps, which is a small revolution in the Eco Systems of system engineering and operations. DevOps as a concept has been an ideal maturity and capability model for IT for some time before the name was ever coined. With the introduction of diverse new capabilities and domain areas it becomes now a reality. Areas such as Application Life-cycle Management (ALM), Application Performance Management (APM), Automation (for code, deployment, integration, test and release). Those capabilities combined with the benefits of virtualization (server, storage, network, services, and data center) and Agile capabilities of creating value to market in a shorter time, they culminate in what I call DevOps Synergistic Adoption in a BVA (Business Value Analysis) context.

The best time is now; when a business case is drafted around existing problems your IT organization faces that can be solved with DevOps adoption. So for instance, when organizations:

• Don’t have a traceability matrix from requirements to code to test and deploy managed by a dynamic integrated run-time (unlike static excel spreadsheets); integrated to project, release, defect management; and reporting in real time.
• When the accountability and responsibility of development, operations, release, QA and information security towards the same final product exist in siloes;
• When the collaboration of all the stakeholders is negatively fragmented;
• When there is little standardization,
• When there is no performance engineering built into the SDLC, those are great use cases for DevOps
• When the time to market of any change or new feature to an application or service does not meet the required business agility.
• When there is too much manual intervention and no central automation to code deployment, test and release.
• The list goes on and on and on ... 

In sum, when there are deficiencies in the collaboration, automation and process enhancement space due to a low level of maturity in one of more of these domain areas. The good news is that almost all existing organizations will have some level of maturity in collaboration, automation and process. Those can be assessed (CMMI/ITIL) and enhanced via a DevOps strategy adoption.

Next we will look at “Who’s Who” in DevOps.