DevOps Teams are Innovators
Each year since 2011, online tools vendor Puppet has created a State of DevOps report with DORA, DevOps Research & Assessment, a non-profit. They’ve surveyed over 27,000 people since starting the reports.
Puppet and DORA released the 2017 State of DevOps Report in mid-June, with plenty of exciting facts about the growth of DevOps and how it’s being implemented by a variety of groups around the world. One interesting figure that pops out is how many software developers are working in unified, integrated DevOps teams.
Based on answers from 3200 respondents, the 2017 Report shows that 27% of software developers worldwide are part of a DevOps team. The 2014 DevOps Report showed that only 16% of software developers worldwide were practicing DevOps. This number has climbed dramatically in just a few years, a 68% increase from 2014 to 2017.
While 27% might look like a great opportunity for Cprime, a DevOps consultant and trainer, and for tool vendors like Puppet, that number also says something significant to those organizations that are considering transforming their teams to DevOps: You are a pioneer.
“DevOps is still pretty new. The field is wide open for innovation and creativity,” said Brandon Cipes, the Cprime vice president who heads up our DevOps practice. “If you choose to go with DevOps now, you can help bring it forward as a practice, adding your unique point of view and experience, helping improve DevOps culture and tools.”
In North America, 54% of software developers work in a DevOps team. Even in North America there’s plenty of room to experiment, innovate, and bring DevOps forward.
What does this mean to your DevOps initiatives? It means you’re in a good position to help define what DevOps is becoming.
It’s intriguing that this year the Puppet/DORA report looked at how great leadership can make a difference to a DevOps team. This is where Cprime can help, consulting with software organizations to pinpoint improvements, and training leaders to be creative and improve their team performance.
The 2017 DevOps Report says:
One of the exciting research focus areas this year is investigating the leadership characteristics that help drive high performance. In our opinion, this has been one of the more overlooked topics in DevOps, despite the fact that transformational leadership is essential.
DevOps can be many things, beginning with a culture of collaboration that brings teams together on great tools, iterating fast, automating their postings to a code repository, sharing visibility into the progress of a team’s work on a common dashboard.
But culture is fragile compared to software or online tools. That’s why it needs a DevOps champion to promote it internally and foster growth and innovation, so it has continued value to the organization and its members participating in DevOps teams.
The 2017 DevOps Report continues:
High-performing teams reported having leaders with the strongest behaviors across all dimensions: vision, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, and personal recognition. In contrast, low-performing teams reported the lowest levels of these leadership characteristics.
As you move forward with your DevOps transformation, training for members and leaders – not necessarily management – will become critical for your success.
Cprime offers consulting for organizations moving to DevOps, and will assess your operations to evaluate the tools and procedures you currently use to better understand how well they work for you.
Then we’ll recommend changes based on best practices and our experience, and with acceptance of a proof of concept will help transform your culture. This might include training leaders and team members.
The point is to create great DevOps teams to continue to advance the practice, making it stronger and more capable for your software team and those just coming online. DevOps is being used by all the leading companies in web-scale software and technology, and has massive benefits for any team that depends on delivering great software – in the “application economy,” that can include you, too.
DevOps Practice at Cprime
This month Cprime is talking about DevOps. What it is. Our approach to DevOps. How we sort out this complex yet powerful behavior and technology. In a series of posts, we’re showing you how DevOps helps any software organization – from large well-established companies to startups – produce better code, collaborate and communicate, and use automation to create, test, and publish better code, faster.
What’s next?
Find out more about Cprime’s DevOps practice
Sign up for our next DevOps and Agile training course
