What Is DevOps?

Prior to DevOps application development, teams were in charge of gathering business requirements for a software program and writing code. Then a separate QA team tests the program in an isolated development environment, if requirements were met, and releases the code for operations to deploy. The deployment teams are further fragmented into siloed groups like networking and database. Each time a software program is “thrown over the wall” to an independent team it adds bottlenecks.

The problem with this paradigm is that when the teams work separately:

• Dev is often unaware of QA and Ops roadblocks that prevent the program from working as anticipated.
• QA and Ops are typically working across many features and have little context of the business purpose and value of the software.
• Each group has opposing goals that can lead to inefficiency and finger pointing when something goes wrong.

DevOps addresses these challenges by establishing collaborative cross-functional teams that share responsibility for maintaining the system that runs the software and preparing the software to run on that system with increased quality feedback and automation issues.