DevOps: 'DevOps will make stuff go faster, but it won't magically fix things if they're broken'

Aubrey Stearn, interim head of DevOps at the Solicitor's Regulation Authority, highlights what agile and DevOps can and can't do for organisations, and argues for developers to be rebranded 'software engineers'

DevOps is a culture which can dramatically speed up software development, but it won't fix broken processes.

That's the opinion of Aubrey Stearn, interim head of DevOps at the Solicitor's Regulation Authority, speaking at Computing's recent DevOps North Live event.

"DevOps will make your development go faster," Stearn began. "DevOps will quickly highlight a quality problem, but it won't magically fix everything," she added.

She continued, stating that adopting practises such as DevOps and Agile doesn't work in the same way for every organisation, and in some instances may not work at all.

"If you're doing all this and it's not working, it's not a religion, you can adapt it. Agile worked for Spotify originally but then it stopped working in the same way as they evolved, so they stopped doing it.

"If you're doing standups every morning and people are catching flies because it's not working for them, stop doing it."

Stearn argued that sometimes it's okay to change methodologies and processes purely for the sake of trying something different.

"Sometimes people want a change, so you change and maybe that shows you that what you were doing before was better, so you can change back again. But at least you've tried something."

She went on to discuss software cycle times, warning developers not to assume that their work is done as soon as they've finished the initial coding work.

"Don't deceive yourself, dev to done is a fake cycle time. It's not done until it's deployed. The true cycle time is development, security, test, then done."

Earlier in her presentation, Stearn argued for more stringent testing to be included in all software development, as a way to improve security.

Stearn finished by calling for the industry to redefine developers as 'software engineers'.

"The DevOps movement is a redefinition of what an engineer is. Let's not call them software developers any more, but software engineers. Don't employ a team of testers, that's the software engineer's job. The person who should be testing your code is the person who wrote it, nobody knows it better.

"So redefine what engineering is, go back and do it properly and you'll find that agile and lean and whatever you want to do will start working for you, as you're being honest with yourself."