Embracing DevOps Culture in Your Release Management Strategy

When DevOps deliverables are used to define success, it can be difficult to get executive buy-in and budgetary support. This is particularly true if senior managers don’t understand the true value that DevOps brings to their customers. Instead, executives might mistake DevOps as being a drain on profits, seeking justification for its existence rather than viewing it as a value multiplier and long-term strategy. In this case, executives might attempt to reduce investment in your team, instead of helping you increase the capacity that is needed to improve the customer experience. Therefore, DevOps leaders must establish a culture of DevOps and define success in terms of customer-centric outcomes.

Building a DevOps culture requires thorough planning and a unified approach. Start by getting buy-in from executive leadership, then form a DevOps team. Once your team has been established, gradually define processes and...

Faster and cheaper doesn’t always mean better

At some point in the evolution of DevOps, and seemingly out of nowhere, we have become a culture that cost-justifies everything. In doing so, we violate the classic axiom that you can only ever satisfy two of three constraints: scope (quality), time (speed), and cost (low cost). This is known as the project management triangle or the triple constraint, which suggests that any change in one of these three constraints will inevitably affect the others; you will have to pick two of them and compromise on the third. All too often, we introduce some new tool and attempt to persuade others about how it will speed things up, result in cost savings, or free up our time for more meaningful tasks. Then, we’d discover how this new tool could improve quality if we extended it by adding yet another new feature or capability with the promise that it would yield a more reliable process compared to the existing one:

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Adopting the CALMS approach

CALMS serves as a conceptual framework for facilitating the seamless integration of DevOps teams, functions, and systems within an organization. The CALMS framework provides a maturity model in the field of computer science, aiding managers in assessing the preparedness of their organization for DevOps implementation. It enables them to identify areas that require modification to achieve readiness. Notably, the CALMS approach is attributed to Jez Humble, one of the co-authors of The DevOps Handbook.

The CALMS framework for DevOps encompasses five fundamental tenets:

• Culture: This encompasses a prevailing ethos of collective accountability.
• Automation: Team members actively pursue opportunities to implement automation to streamline and optimize various processes while embracing continuous delivery.
• Lean practices: Instead of working on multiple tasks simultaneously, focus on a smaller number of tasks at a time. Lean emphasizes visualizing...

It takes time to develop a DevOps mindset

The implementation of significant organizational transformations should ideally occur in a series of phases. Otherwise, resistance or confusion may arise. Rapidly challenging groupthink might result in a jarring experience known as culture shock.

Embracing a DevOps culture necessitates obtaining agreement and support from individuals across all levels of the organizational hierarchy, including developers, systems administrators, security specialists, and executives alike. Teams must comprehend the enduring and immediate advantages of DevOps and they will likely require a demonstration of the changes in the processes. Ensure that these modifications are thoroughly documented and effectively communicated to all individuals. Productivity will be negatively affected and there may be further harmful outcomes unless colleagues recognize that the fundamental principles of DevOps, including efficiency, adaptability, continuous learning, and unity...

Summary

This concludes Chapter 8. At this point, you have a solid understanding of why faster and cheaper doesn’t always mean better. You also know why DevOps is about more than just tools and processes – it’s about people first. Furthermore, you have been introduced to the CALMS approach, a conceptual framework for facilitating the seamless integration of DevOps teams, functions, and systems within an organization. Finally, you should now be able to clearly articulate why it takes time to develop a DevOps mindset. Reaching a state of maturity on your DevOps journey can take months, if not years.

In the next chapter, you will learn what receiving support from leadership and stakeholders looks like. You will be shown why DevOps culture must exude high levels of patience, trust, ethics, and empowerment. You will also discover why tight strategic alignment around investments in staff and technology is invaluable. Finally, you’ll learn how to collect and...

Questions

Answer the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter:

1. What are the three elements of the project management triangle?
2. What are the consequences of skimping on product quality?
3. What does paired programming entail?
4. What do elite DevOps teams focus on first?
5. Question
6. What does the acronym CALMS stand for?
7. Which Agile methodologies are complementary to the CALMS framework?
8. What are the core tenets of lean engineering practices?
9. Successfully embracing a DevOps culture necessitates obtaining agreement and support from who?
10. Why do cultural shifts pose significant challenges?