To meet the demands of a dynamic and innovative market, IT companies opt to embrace the DevOps culture. This methodology is gaining increasing popularity as it enables deeper collaboration between development and operations teams, resulting in accelerated software development and enhanced quality. Find out how it significantly impacts the performance of IT companies. Hint: profoundly! 

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What is DevOps culture?

DevOps is an innovative organizational culture that entails close and efficient collaboration between the software development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams to enhance the efficiency of this process. It’s much more than a methodology; it’s a way of thinking and a set of practices aimed at improving the speed, quality, and reliability of software by breaking down the barriers between development, testing, and operations teams. This culture is not built on tools and processes but on people and their relationships. Effective interaction and collaboration between development and operations teams are what create and drive the DevOps culture. 

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The pillars of DevOps culture

DevOps culture is based on several key principles and practices, such as: 

Ongoing collaboration and communication between developers and operational teams, leading to full engagement at every stage of the software development cycle – from planning, building, deploying, providing feedback, to continuous improvement. 

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a crucial practice in DevOps culture that utilizes tools to manage infrastructure through code. It is the process of automating the entire infrastructure creation and configuration process, making it easier to manage and enhancing security. 

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) involves the use of automated testing and deployment processes to rapidly and continuously integrate changes into the code. This significantly shortens the software development cycle. 

Automation of repetitive tasks, such as software creation, testing, and deployment, enables the quick detection of errors after each change and increases application stability. It also enhances performance and reliability. 

Monitoring and feedback, by tracking and analyzing every stage of software development, helps identify errors, improve them, and, consequently, significantly boost overall performance. 

Why it's worth introducing a DevOps culture into your organization?

Why it’s worth introducing a DevOps culture into your organization? 

In the ‘Atlassian DevOps Trends’ research¹, 99% of respondents stated that the DevOps culture has a positive impact on their organizations. This result is not surprising at all! A work approach that emphasizes greater engagement of teams brings several tangible benefits, including: 

  • Facilitating more efficient collaboration among teams and saving time related to handovers of work. 
  • Increasing the speed of the process, specifically the frequency and pace of product releases. 
  • Ensuring higher quality and reliability of delivered software. 
  • Reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. 
  • Enhancing the innovation of delivered solutions. 
  • Allowing for faster and more flexible fixes and improvements. 
  • Enabling more effective exploration, experimentation, and implementation of innovations. 
  • Quickly identifying and eliminating any obstacles that arise between different phases of the entire software lifecycle process. 
  • Making employees feel more engaged. 
  • Minimizing outages. 

DevOps culture and the performance of IT companies

Instead of a culture based on rules or authority, DevOps supports a performance-based business environment. Its overarching goal is to shorten the software delivery cycle, increase deployment frequency, and enhance the quality and reliability of services. 

The introduction and promotion of DevOps best practices in an organization aim to identify and eliminate obstacles that arise between different phases of the software development process. This leads to faster achievement of business goals, with a very low risk of delays or errors. 

What drives the DevOps culture is collaboration, communication, and integration between development and operations teams. Specialists are no longer confined to separate silos. They work on shared projects and objectives, making the workflow faster and more productive. This optimization of processes significantly improves the company’s performance. 

This way of working increases motivation and job satisfaction among employees and promotes their professional development. As a result, they are much more engaged in the projects they work on. As shown by research conducted by Google DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)², job satisfaction is a key indicator of performance in organizations. 

Summary

DevOps culture is gaining increasing popularity. By focusing on breaking down silos between development and operations teams, it has proven to be one of the most effective and efficient methods of software development. 

Combining values such as collaboration, automation, monitoring, and flexibility accelerates software delivery and enhances its quality. By implementing a DevOps culture, organizations can respond more effectively to rapidly changing market demands and significantly increase their performance. 

Discover the latest IT salary rates and learn about the current compensation trends in the industry. Download the IT Salaries in Poland 2023 Report. 

About the author

Dominika Opozda has 6 years of professional experience in IT recruitment. She is a Team Leader of the IT recruitment team in Gdansk. As a labor market expert, she gains experience working with corporate clients, investors, and product companies. She manages recruitment processes for mid-level and senior positions, as well as at the Executive level, primarily in the fields of development and infrastructure. 

Sources used in this article: ¹Atlassian, Atlassian Survey 2020 – DevOps Trend, accessed on September 6, 2023, Source. ²Google Cloud, 2022 State of DevOps Report, accessed on September 6, 2023, Source. 

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