What is a DevOps culture?
Creating a DevOps culture encompasses more than just automated testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery techniques. Although these procedures are included in the DevOps idea, this concept also includes other things.
Adopting the ideals that support DevOps principles and applying its best practices and tools fundamentally constitutes creating a DevOps culture. You might think of it as a set of principles that emphasizes creating a culture of continuous learning and promoting honest feedback-sharing amongst teams.
To put it another way, a DevOps culture is fundamentally about improving communication between the development and operations teams to promote shared accountability and responsibility for software releases. Those teams need to embrace a common culture and attitude that will enable them to concentrate on software quality and delivery speed. By fostering such a culture of cooperative efforts across the software development life cycle, the DevOps philosophy also emphasizes the idea of continuous improvement.
Therefore, improved cooperation, openness, and communication amongst these teams—which previously operated more independently to boost productivity—form the basis of a DevOps culture.
How can you successfully achieve a DevOps culture?
Start at the top
Senior stakeholders and leaders must be actively involved in and fully supportive of the development of an effective DevOps culture since strong leadership tends to model open communication by fostering teamwork.
In order for teams to understand why DevOps needs to be deployed across all workflows, leaders must promote it throughout the organization and communicate both its ideals and benefits.
Invest in the right people for your team
Concentrate on hiring individuals with a problem-solving orientation who are willing to learn about and adopt your company's culture as well as make sure they are in line with the organizational DevOps vision so they can confidently lead this cultural shift.
Your DevOps team will be the cornerstone on which all your DevOps initiatives are based, after all. The quality of the final output will be higher the better diverse teams and team members work together.
Work towards common goals
The primary goal is exactly one of the first things you should ask yourself when you initially start your DevOps journey, once that has been established, it is crucial for all teams to have a clear sense of the direction the business is taking and to be united by similar goals to adopt the appropriate mentality.
As they use these objectives to decide what projects to prioritize and what products to work on that best fulfill business objectives, this will aid in better orienting your DevOps culture shift and help when developing and deploying software.
Along with organizational-level objectives, this will also include team and project-level objectives. Which objectives you choose will rely on your team's and project's requirements, such as lowering time to market or boosting productivity. The difficulties and pain points that your teams are experiencing will determine this, which is why continuous communication is crucial.
Once more, leadership will be crucial in ensuring that all teams are on the same page by sharing the overall vision and communicating goals at all levels of the organization.
Automate where possible
The use of automation in software development and deployment is a crucial component of a DevOps culture automation allows continuous enhancement to products and helps react rapidly and efficiently to client input by automating certain procedures.
Without automation, teams will have to complete a lot of tedious manual operations, which could add to delays and mistakes. On the other hand, automation frees teams to concentrate on ongoing innovation and improvement without worrying about tiresome activities, which improves happiness for both teams and customers.
Truly embracing a DevOps culture
There are many important measures to be taken before truly embracing a DevOps culture, such as preparing your staff for the change, by giving them the appropriate instructions and resources, as well as by teaching the DevOps cultural attitude that goes along with it.
Without the ability of your teams to come together and work together toward shared objectives to ship reliable software more quickly, a DevOps culture will not truly flourish. To establish the ideal atmosphere that supports a DevOps culture and enables teams to seamlessly move to the DevOps philosophy, leadership's support and dedication will be necessary.
In other words, it is impossible to create a true DevOps culture until the entire company works together to produce business value and promote growth for the entire organization.
If your organisation needs to establish and promote an effective DevOps culture, our experts are ready to provide you with all the advisory, guidance, and processes necessary to undertake this transition.
Keyrus prides itself on assisting customers with the advisory and practical implementation of technology to build sustainable growth for your business. The experts at Keyrus have a passion for designing a solution to any business challenges your organisation may face, we make data matter.
Learn more about Keyrus or contact us directly at steven.hunt@keyrus.co.za.