The Devops movement is built around a group of people who believe that the application of a combination of appropriate technology and attitude can revolutionize the world of software development and delivery. Communication is the key here.
The attitude that we are talking about is: Imagine all technical people feeling empowered, and capable of helping in all areas. Devs creating scenarios and thinking in business problems, QA thinking in infrastructure solutions, etc.
DevOps expands the concept of Agile not only for the code part but the entire project, from the scratch up to the maintenance phase. For this reason I found DevOps very similar with BDD.
Look this:
One of the key concepts is is involving the entire team (DBAS, Devs, QA, System administrators …) in the project from the scratch.
As you can see, DevOps and BDD follow the concept of all the team working together and participating since the beginning of the project. So, you can find the problems before you actually start develop something. The aims here are reduce time to deliver, increase the quality, share knowledge, cooperative work, earn money.
“DevOps” doesn’t differentiate between different sysadmin sub-disciplines – “Ops” is a blanket term for systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and various other subdisciplines and job titles. “Dev” is used as shorthand for developers in particular, but really in practice it is even wider and means “all the people involved in developing the product,” which can include Product, QA, and other kinds of disciplines.
This post on The Agile Admin compares & contrasts DevOps with Agile:
“The best way to define <Devops> in depth is to compare to the definition of agile development. Agile development, according to Wikipedia and the agile manifesto, consists of a couple different “levels” of thinking.
Agile Principles – like “business/users and developers working together.” These are the core values that inform agile, like collaboration, people over process, software over documentation, and responding to change over planning.
Agile Methods – specific process types used to implement the agile principles. Iterations, Lean, XP, Scrum. “As opposed to waterfall.”
Agile Practices – techniques often found in conjunction with agile development, not linked to a given method flavor, like test driven development, continuous integration, etc.
I believe the different parts of DevOps that people are talking about map directly to these three levels.
DevOps Principles – How we need to think differently about operations. Examples include dev/ops collaboration, “infrastructure as code,” and other high level concepts; things likeJames Turnbull’s 4-part model seem to be spot on examples of trying to define this arena.
DevOps Methods – Process you use to conduct agile operations – including iterations, lean/kanban, stuff you’d read in Visible Ops.
DevOps Practices – Specific techniques and tools used as part of implementing the processes, like automated build and provisioning, continuous deployment, monitoring, anything you’d have a “toolchain” for.”
So, the Devops movement is characterized by people with a multidisciplinary skill set – people who are comfortable with infrastructure and configuration, but also happy to roll up their sleeves, write tests, debug, and ship features.
I’ve summarised with a mix of researches and my own opinion. I hope this helps you have a better understanding what is this trend and how you can apply it. See you next week ! Thank you 🙂
Sources:
http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing-anyway/
http://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
http://www.itpi.org/home/visibleops.php
Rafaela Azevedo 