DevOps is a Tool-Centric Cultural Shift That Supports a Continuous-Delivery Value Chain. Not a Market.

My colleagues Laurie F. Wurster, Christopher Little and Thomas E. Murphy have just published an extremely interesting paper on DevOps: Market Trends: DevOps — Not a Market, but a Tool-Centric Cultural Shift That Supports a Continuous-Delivery Value Chain.

In the paper they highlight how digital business demands a high degree of automation for improved speed and consistent software delivery. Therefore their advice to product management leaders is to focus on tool functionality that supports collaboration, automation and agile/lean methodologies to deliver on the promise of DevOps.

In fact, DevOps is a cultural change that requires a collection of practices, such as the agile movement (see  "Avoid Failure by Developing a Toolchain That Enables DevOps" for detail). However, without a clear set of governing principles to support the automation of delivering software and infrastructure, change management remains a difficult process for most IT organizations.

So what is the best way to think about DevOps according to my esteemed colleagues?

DevOps remains focused on adoption of agile and lean methodologies, and automating repetitive tasks, with a singular goal of timely, successful application releases. 

BTW they also mention very promising numbers: adoption of DevOps tools is expected to continue at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% over the next five years.

Find the full research is here: Market Trends: DevOps — Not a Market, but a Tool-Centric Cultural Shift That Supports a Continuous-Delivery Value Chain (Warning: you must be a Gartner client to access the document)

To explore what market studies on the software industry Gartner will publish this year, see: Exploit Enterprise Infrastructure Software Opportunities for 2018

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