What is DevOps?

The DevOps term originally came from Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer in 2008.  There was a presentation at a conference with “10 deploys per day” and it was given by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond.  DevOps helps to apply Lean Principles to the IT process.  These principles have evolved over a period over 00 years based upon sound management practices.  DevOps helps to accelerate the workflow through Product Management, Development, Test, IT Operations and Information Security.  DevOps has been helped through the work of the Agile Community and the two work best hand in hand.  Teams that operate with a high level of trust combined with batches of small work are able to deliver frequent software releases into production.  This helps to increase the productivity of software development.

DevOps extends and builds upon the practice of “infrastructure as code” which was originally pioneered by Dr. Mark Burgess.  Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are also important pieces of DevOps and those were pioneered by Jez Humble and David Farley.  Some of the other movements such as Lean Startup, Innovative Culture, Toyota Kata, and Rugged Computing have worked together to complement DevOps and help accelerate the adoption of these principles.  It will be interesting to see how DevOps evolves in the next several years.  I anticipate a high degree of utilization as companies look to deliver based upon the needs of business customers.

If you would like more information on Agile, DevOps or Software Testing, please visit my Software Testing Blog or my Software Testing YouTube Channel.