Take a holistic approach to breaking down silos, fostering honest communication, and delivering better products
Development teams are feeling the crunch to deliver better products faster than ever before. Heavy workloads and inefficient processes are significant roadblocks to achieving these goals, with nearly half of senior engineers saying alleviating team burnout is their number one concern. As a result, more teams are looking to implement DevOps processes to address these concerns.
However, DevOps isn’t a simple fix for deeper, intrinsic problems, and it’s not just a job title to fill. It’s a culture that must be built from the ground up and reinforced through communication. If you’ve ever asked, “What is DevOps culture?” this guide is for you.
What is DevOps Culture?
DevOps culture is a development approach that relies on unified teams, automated processes, and rigorous feedback to deliver higher-quality code faster and more reliably.
The core philosophy of DevOps formed around Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' approach to empowering developers with ongoing ownership of their work: "You build it, you run it." For Vogels, this meant putting developers in a situation where they could see and touch the aspects of their product that directly impact operations and their customers.
Building a DevOps culture, then, is about creating the working conditions for this type of philosophy to take root and grow throughout an entire organization.
What does that mean in practical terms for the developers doing the day-to-day work of building world-class products? It means demolishing the silos that separate development teams and operation teams, allowing engineers to take a more holistic approach to product development, deployment, and quality assurance. By doing so, teams can do better work faster and more reliably while speaking directly to the end user’s needs.
To reap the rewards of a DevOps culture transformation, every organization must prioritize several core components. These include:
- Transparency: Teams can only do their best work when they trust each other implicitly. This means offering a full window into the work being done and the processes that enable that work to be done across product departments. Knowledge sharing is a priority, so everyone understands what every member is working on, regardless of their role.
- Collaboration: Open communication and teamwork are crucial for building a DevOps culture. Developers need to be able to work together on complex projects and rely on each others’ strengths. They also need to break down the silos between operations teams, quality assurance, and IT departments, identify skill gaps, and form processes that bring everyone into alignment. Team members must also be able to deliver and receive honest feedback without the fear of reprisal or blame to improve processes and deliver a better product.
- Ownership: Teams share the responsibility for products they create, both in development and operations. This allows developers to take pride in their work while simultaneously improving it as new needs or glitches arise.
- Autonomy: By taking ownership of the development and operations processes, developers gain the ability to make rapid decisions without the need to wait for approval.
- User experience: The holistic approach of DevOps considers the user experience in all aspects of development, leading to a better product for the customer.
- Automation: By automating routine processes throughout the CI/CD pipeline, DevOps culture unlocks speedier processes to make development more efficient. A transition to a reliance on dozens (or hundreds) of automated microservices has made platform engineering tools such as DuploCloud essential for cultivating a DevOps culture. Download our free report and learn how working developers and IT professionals embrace platform engineering to adopt a DevOps culture mindset.
The Benefits of DevOps Culture
By transitioning to a DevOps mindset, organizations can see both immediate and long-term benefits to their product, including:
- Improved communication: A DevOps culture means no more silos. Everyone involved with the product is seen as an equal part of the team and has equal visibility into the project, making communication between specialists more impactful.
- More efficient development: Using a DevOps mindset helps teams deliver code to production faster, reduce wasted effort, and minimize the time spent configuring systems.
- Better-quality product: When everyone shares responsibility for the product, everyone strives to deliver their best work, lifting quality across the board.
- Increased job satisfaction: When developers can work autonomously, they can challenge themselves with the tasks they’re most passionate about without running into unnecessary friction. Autonomy leads to better work, and when developers are doing better work, they’re happier at their job.
How to Develop a DevOps Culture and Mindset
A DevOps culture transformation won’t happen overnight. But you can take the following steps now to begin your transition, building lasting processes that will rapidly bring your team and your product immeasurable value.
- Get buy-in: People must participate in the DevOps culture to make it stick. That’s why getting buy-in throughout the organization is vital, from the executive level at the top to the developers doing the work. Reduce silos by unifying teams and get people working together.
- Foster an environment of honest communication and feedback: DevOps encompasses culture and collaboration, so don’t forget to create an environment where developers are encouraged to talk about what’s going well and what isn’t. Ensure that people on your team aren’t playing the blame game; mistakes are part of development, and everyone owns the final product. Honest feedback is the only way to ensure all aspects of the product can improve, and your team shouldn’t have to fear reprisal for delivering or receiving said feedback.
- Give developers control: Developers are the ones with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the product, so they should be the ones to decide what needs to be done and how to do it. Giving them control also gives them the freedom to make autonomous decisions, ultimately making development more efficient.
- Integrate QA into DevOps culture: Bring QA teams into the development process early and work with them to make deployments more stable and reliable. Build automated testing processes to reduce the amount of friction between deployments.
- Don’t make too many changes at once: Adopting too many changes at once can lead to developer burnout and ultimately cause a DevOps culture transformation to fail. Try to make gradual adjustments, focusing on areas that can benefit the most, and add more changes when teams are ready.
- Evaluate and iterate on processes: Building a DevOps culture requires constant iteration. As you’re gathering honest feedback, use this information to adjust your approach as needed.
Make DuploCloud the Backbone of Your DevOps Culture
Building a DevOps culture and mindset requires considering all development processes and the tools used to turn these processes into action. DuploCloud can help to make this transformation a reality. It’s a DevOps Automation Platform combined with deep subject matter expertise that allows teams to streamline operations, maximize their security and compliance postures, and unlock developer self-service capabilities that speed up deployment times by a factor of ten.
Want to find out how DuploCloud can unlock the full potential of the DevOps mindset for your business? Contact us today to schedule a 30-minute live demo.
