DevOps is a worthy endeavor, producing a deeper understanding between the development staff and IT operations. Then again, maybe it’s just a shell game being played by those charlatans down the hall.
Those seem to be the two poles of misunderstanding about DevOps, Forrester Research analysts Glenn O’Donnell and Kurt Bittner suggest. They published a report Tuesday, “The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective DevOps.”
The report at first sounds like the famous line from Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” O’Donnell and Bittner point out that an IT leader who wishes to implement DevOps must clear up a lot of misunderstanding. In the past, what the development team produced didn’t always run well in operations, and the feedback offered by the operations staff was viewed as hypercritical by the developers. “The detritus of accumulated and reinforced stereotypes is destructive to organizational harmony,” the authors warn in a section called, “Negative Stereotypes Cripple Your Business.”
Wait a minute. The introduction of DevOps isn’t the first rodeo for legions of IT employees. They have a rich amount of experience on which they base their view of the inadequacies of the other side. This feud has been going on longer than AMC’s The Walking Dead.