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7 DevOps Habits

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Glenn O'Donnell and Kurt Bittner, Forrester Research analysts, have published a report that describes how developers and operations see each other when working in isolation and offers seven habits of collaboration between the two. Their "The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective DevOps" are:

  1. Getting the two sides to talk to each other
  2. Taking an outside-in approach to everything
  3. Automating the build, test and release processes so they contain less human error
  4. Simplifying and standardizing the development and production environments
  5. Instilling a culture of systems engineering across both development and operations
  6. Implementing feedback and feed-forward loops
  7. Putting developers on the front line of support

They go into detail for each of them:

Getting the two sides to talk to each other

Talking face to face is a good way to learn about each other's daily challenges and struggles. This knowledge lets developers and operations put each other's actions into context and help each to understand the other better. While this should be pretty obvious, you can't get started with DevOps without this as a prerequisite.

Taking an outside-in approach to everything

It's pretty common for IT to see what's available and try to do the best with it. DevOps requires a different view: both developers and operations need to understand the needs of the business customers first. Based on those needs they should define what's necessary to satisfy them. This outside-in approach can lead to a fundamental shift in how developers and operations prioritize their work.

Automating the build, test and release processes so they contain less human error

It's important that both, developers and operations work together to automate the delivery process. Things like scalabilitiy-testing is the area of expertise of operations while testing business functions is what developers are used to test. On top of test automation they should use readily available tools for automating the infrastructure.

Simplifying and standardizing the development and production environments

The important point here is that you should enforce simplification on new systems, but only do as much as reasonably possible with your existing systems. James Governor recently held a DevOps expert panel where he asked whether it is necessary to simplify your infrastructure in order to be able to introduce DevOps.

Instilling a culture of systems engineering across both development and operations

Break down monolithic software into easier to handle modules - no matter whether you're automating your infrastructure or writing application code.

Implementing feedback and feed-forward loops

To ensure that your applications run smoothly, developers need feedback on how the applications are doing in production. And operations needs information on the required runtime environment as early as possible in the process.

Putting developers on the front line of support

Even though support task will take developers away of the more creative work it's important that they deal with the issues their code creating in production. Not only are they the ones who can fix glitches the fastest but also do they learn a lot about how their applications behave in production.

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