DevOps’ Three Ways Were Never About Tooling
Somewhere along the way, DevOps became a tooling conversation. Ask someone how mature their DevOps practice is and the answer will often involve CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code, observability, deployment frequency, or some combination of the above. All valuable tools, but that is often where the conversation ends. They compartmentalize DevOps principles to […]
DevOps has become associated with tooling, such as CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code, observability, deployment frequency, and more. However, these are just tools and the Three Ways of DevOps - Flow, Feedback, and Continual Learning - are not limited to software delivery. They describe how information moves through a system, how the system learns from that movement, and how learning changes what happens next.
The principles of DevOps are derived from Lean and Agile, and share a common pattern of plan, do, study, act. The focus on flow often overlooks the importance of amplifying feedback and continual learning. While automated testing, telemetry, and monitoring alerts provide valuable feedback, they are only useful if they help shorten the distance between an action and its consequences.
The feedback should come from customers, who can only judge value after seeing the product. This reinforces the need for frequent retrospectives and experiments to test changes in a system. Ultimately, the principles of DevOps apply to all aspects of an organization, from customer research to strategic direction, and can lead to continual improvement.
Written by urgent.news from DevOps.com's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
