Aecom says DevOps naturally evolved in its organisation

IT director says it has been working with a DevOps model for some time because of a lack of resources and funding

Leading construction and engineering services firm Aecom found that a DevOps model of software development naturally evolved within its organisation due to a lack of resources and funding, according to Matt Sharp, IT director UK, Ireland and continental Europe.

"Other organisations are quite formal in their separation of development and operations, but actually the development teams we have in EMEA have been on a DevOps model for some time by not having the luxury of resources," said Sharp.

He continued: "There are 15 people in our business systems team working to a DevOps model. There are analysts, developers, testers and support people working on various applications. It's a needs must situation, they've each filled every type of role in the team, and they know the coding inside out. When your organisation becomes more agile, you find the team has to work in this way."

Sharp previously worked as IT infrastructure operations manager for retailer Marks & Spencer, where he said there was a strict segregation of operations and developers.

"The teams were kept separate so there was no overlap of responsibility or accountability, so you didn't have testers just signing something off because they'd worked on the build. But over five or so years as the environment became more agile and teams reduced in size to drive more cost efficiency, they decided to have one pool of development, testers and support.

"That way you can more easily make changes on the fly, and respond to demand much more quickly. It can make sense, but you do lose that segregation. It's not as clean, so you need more rigour in the policing of what goes on," he conceded, referring back to the issue of testers passing code simply because they'd worked on it and therefore assumed it was fine.

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