devops culture - what is and how to build devops culture

What is DevOps Culture?

DevOps culture emphasizes on small and multidisciplinary teams, who work autonomously and take collective accountability on customer feedback. In a DevOps culture, “control” must be distributed. Teams become self-driven and self-managing. Improvement is controlled through testing with the desire to improve a pervasive element of everyone’s approach to their mission.

How to build DevOps culture ?

Here is what you need to do to create a successful DevOps culture in your organization.

Promote communication and collaboration : The first and most important principle behind DevOps is the successful collaboration between the operations and the development teams. By creating a unilateral team, the DevOps team can focus on delivering the organization’s common goals and achieve its purpose.
Start small, but not too small : If you’ve decided to transition to a DevOps culture, it’s important not to overwhelm yourself or your team with a sudden, tumultuous change. Explore the DevOps process with a project of manageable size and constantly field feedback from team members along the way. Your pilot project should be important enough to convince higher-ups of the effectiveness of the new culture, but not so big that you’re overwhelmed with unprecedented setbacks and difficulties while rolling out the new process.
Get leadership on board : Having company executives who endorse this transition to DevOps is important for the success of its implementation. You’ll face less resistance from both team members and higher-ups when everyone is convinced that this is a change that is here to stay. Rather than starting from the bottom-up, a top-down approach to initiating a DevOps culture is the ideal way to ensure that teams experience smooth integration with little opposition from skeptical bosses.
Set common goals : As silos break down and teams are brought in contact with each other, outline clear objectives for everyone involved so that development and operations teams can align their goals. Customer satisfaction should be the ultimate aim of all teams involved so that changing demands are quickly met, new requirements are filled in, and customer complaints are immediately addressed and resolved. With everyone pooling their skill-sets and resources to work toward an overarching aim, development becomes more streamlined and much more efficient.
Facilitate continuous improvement : As customer needs diversify, competitors innovate, and regulations change, teams need to work together to catch up to changing product requirements and environments. There is no stagnation in a DevOps culture, as processes are constantly being upgraded and improved, and cutting-edge tools become easier to introduce to employees.
Automation is key : A fundamental aspect of DevOps culture is automation as it supports continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines that allow applications to be developed and deployed efficiently. Automating important processes like building new systems, deploying software, testing for bugs and security issues, and infrastructure provisioning can allow DevOps teams to deliver applications and software to customers without much delay. Automation allows applications to be deployed quickly, reliably, and safely by machines which have been programmed with all the steps involved in a deployment.
Encourage innovation : DevOps culture pushes employees out of their comfort zones and beyond their skill sets and encourages them to try new things, learn new skills, and be curious about processes they are not traditionally responsible for. Fostering a DevOps culture requires team members to be willing to learn about stages in product development that they may have not been directly involved with in the past.
Allow room for failure : Perhaps the biggest cultural change that organizations need to effect if they are to adopt DevOps is to discard their standards that demand perfect results every single time. Unless management is willing to reward creativity and innovation and embrace the uncertainty and risk of failure that these bring, they will not be able to shift toward a DevOps organizational culture.
Sustain end-to-end responsibility : It’s easy for developers to relinquish responsibility for code they’ve written once it’s been passed into the hands of the operations team, who then deploy and manage it. However, DevOps ensures that these roles and responsibilities are no longer completely distinct from one another. Development and operations groups are expected to collaborate on deliverables from the beginning of a project to its delivery, and even beyond that, on maintaining the product and resolving any client issues or requests. Ensuring end-to-end responsibility for products is essential in an integrated team environment. Rather than increasing the burden on employees, DevOps culture distributes responsibilities to ensure timely delivery, fewer issues, and faster implementation of client requests.
Share knowledge : Finally, the most important step in integrating teams is to have them pass on what they’ve learned, their understanding of the systems they use, and even their skill-sets to other team members. Each team member should ideally have a comprehensive knowledge of the processes that the applications they develop go through. Since employees work together toward a common goal, the ability to stop at any step of the process can reduce dependencies and promote CI/CD pipelines. The collaborative process not only promotes efficiency, but it also empowers employees to challenge themselves and push the boundaries of their areas of expertise.