DevOps: A breakdown of common misconceptions

DevOps is all about culture.

It is about creating a culture of homogeneous and inclusive work efforts between all team members- from the project manager to the QA subteam- in order to achieve a smoother and faster-flowing software lifecycle.

In today's IT environment, everyone has different notions of what DevOps is and what it entails. At times it can be a source of contention and friction between the implementers. The DevOpsDays conference in Belgium was only nine years ago, in 2009. Yet, for being so young, the approach has garnered more than its fair share of confusion. Let's review some of the distortions.

DevOps Team

Some organizations leap at the mention of DevOps to create an entirely new team, complete with managers and other resources. Based on the definition provided by DevOps Dictionary, this is a problematic approach to DevOps, which focuses on its emphasis on deviating from overspecialization. Using this paradigm, creating a team just for DevOps is paradoxical. 

CI/CD is DevOps

Continuous Integration (CI) was first coined by Grady Booch in his 1991 book "The Booch methodology," in which Booch identified a need for continuous integration of code as part of a healthy software lifecycle. Nowhere did he stipulate that CI would occur more than once daily. 

Continuous Delivery (CD) is aimed at releasing software more frequently while raising its level of reliability through the automation of testing, packaging, and monitoring. Continuous deployment becomes a part of the CD chain when we replace manual deployment process with an automated one.

To say CI/CD is an imperative component of DevOps, would be to say a an engine is part of its tune-up or a tree is part of its pruning. 

It is 5-Stage or 7-Stage?

The confusion between the levels DevOps maturity and stages of DevOps is yet another source of disagreement.

There are 7 stages in DevOps:

While there are 5 levels to DevOps maturity:

To be continued...