DevOps Live: "DevOps is not a checklist"

Defining DevOps as a term is hard; defining the process is even harder

Just like there is no single definition for the term ‘DevOps' - or not one that everyone agrees on - there is also no one approach to its implementation.

During a session dedicated to DevOps tools and strategies at Computing's DevOps Live North event in Manchester today, panelists spoke about their own experiences with beginning the DevOps process - agreeing that trying to follow a rigid checklist is a futile gesture.

Ryan Bryers, CTO and CIO at Worldline, admitted that, "As much as pure techies would like to, we haven't taken the purest approach and made everyone move to DevOps."

Worldline has debated DevOps rollouts at many levels, and has spent several years seeing what works.

"Now we're pausing to say ‘What is the dev strategy across the business?'" Bryers continued. "We could roll out one way of working and seven per cent of people would adopt it, so we know we need to put out three or four options that we're happy with for people to adopt. It certainly isn't going to be ‘This is the one way'."

Natasha Wright, DevOps manager at Accenture, had a similar experience. She said that one of first things that the company did when moving into DevOps was to create a list that they thought contained all of the essential components. "Actually, as that conversation and journey has progressed," she said, "we've realised that completing things in a checklist isn't really what DevOps is."

Accenture is a professional services firm, and has also experienced this tendency among its clients:

"We worked with a partner recently who had this really great Powerpoint deck of all of these things that should be automated, and they said, ‘We're not doing this so we're not doing DevOps'. Actually, they were completely forgetting that DevOps is all about doing things quickly, it's not necessarily about automating everything or having the right tools.

"When we talk about the things that we won't do [around DevOps], it's not a case of ‘You must do these things in this checklist to conform to this DevOps agenda'."