DevOps: Theory Vs. Practice

Abstract

DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and philosophy, that integrates and automates the processes between development, IT teams, quality engineering and security, so they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. Companies are adopting DevOps to achieve efficiency, high performance to focus on building products faster for greater customer satisfaction. DevOps became more important especially after Agile methodology was adopted widely across organizations. Agile improved the development speed greatly while there was no improvement in operations. Product operations became a big bottleneck which slowed down the release cycle. DevOps was born out of this need to improvise operations to match the fast output that Agile was able to deliver. DevOps achieved this by simplifying the complex operations procedures which allowed a single team to manage the whole application development lifecycle. Unlike earlier days, we don’t find separate teams for development and operations anymore. This eliminated the blame game which used to plague the industry earlier. We conducted telephonic interviews of 5 professionals. The purpose of the primary research was to get qualitative insights about how the DevOps is implemented and followed by companies. We wanted to check and understand the areas where the DevOps is different from the theory. A questionnaire was designed with areas focusing on the delivery methods, deployment, development, and reporting structure based on secondary research.