DevOps

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a blending of the terms Development and Operations. Its goal is to shorten the system’s development life cycle while also delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives (Wikipedia). DevOps arose from the success in the speed of development in Agile, when it became clear that there is a lack of communication between development and operations teams that put a significant hindrance on speed and flexibility of code delivery to users (TechTarget). Compared to the Waterfall method of software development, DevOps is a more continuous flow: continuous development, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring.  

The topic was popularized with the book The Phoenix Project in 2013. This narrative fictional story was meant to help IT managers understand the concept of collaboration and shared technologies (TechTarget).

DevOps is focused on collaboration between the development and operations teams, thus has the option to create a cultural change in companies. At the same time, getting the different groups to work together generates a critical challenge to DevOps (Computerworld). 

How does DevOps relate to Intelligent Swarming?

Both Intelligent Swarming and DevOps have a focus on collaboration, knowledge exchange, and learning. Intelligent Swarming can become part of the DevOps process. Swarm teams can collaborate on a part of the development or on a certain fix. By easily finding the right professionals (through People Profiles) and letting them collaborate, the swarm team can efficiently work on a fix or a part of the software development. Selecting the right people that are available will reduce time.

Learning and skill development are important for DevOps. Because the area that DevOps covers is broad, DevOps suits generalists better than specialists (TechTarget). DASA (Develop Agile Skills Association) has developed competencies for a DevOps. They “reflect the vision that the role of the IT engineer will become more generic as DevOps teams develop”. By indicating skill and knowledge areas, the emphasis has come more on what we called earlier the T-shaped person who not only has well-developed technical competencies.