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The value of DevOps is big. Nearly all (99%) of respondents said DevOps has had a positive impact on their organization, according to the 2020 DevOps Trends Survey. Teams that practice DevOps ship better work faster, streamline incident responses, and improve collaboration and communication across teams.

Collaboration and trust

Building a culture of shared responsibility, transparency, and faster feedback is the foundation of every high-performing DevOps team. In fact, collaboration and problem-solving ranked as the most important elements of a successful DevOps culture, according to our 2020 DevOps Trends survey.

Teams that work in silos often don't adhere to the systems thinking DevOps espouses. Systems thinking is being aware of how your actions not only affect your team, but all the other teams involved in the release process. Lack of visibility and shared goals means lack of dependency planning, misaligned priorities, finger pointing, and “not our problem” mentality, resulting in slower velocity and substandard quality. DevOps is that change in mindset of looking at the development process holistically and breaking down the barrier between development and operations.

Release faster and work smarter

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What is DevOps?

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Build a DevOps culture

Speed is everything. Teams that practice DevOps release deliverables more frequently, with higher quality and stability. In fact, the DORA “2019 State of DevOps” report found that elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams.

A lack of automated test and review cycles slow the release to production, while poor incident response time kills velocity and team confidence. Disparate tools and processes increase operating costs, lead to context switching, and can slow down momentum. Yet with tools that drive automation and new processes, teams can increase productivity and release more frequently with fewer hiccups.

Accelerate time-to-resolution

The team with the fastest feedback loop is the team that thrives. Full transparency and seamless communication enable DevOps teams to minimize downtime and resolve issues faster.

If critical issues aren't resolved quickly, customer satisfaction tanks. Key issues slip through the cracks in the absence of open communication, resulting in increased tension and frustration among teams. Open communication helps development and operations teams swarm on issues, fix incidents, and unblock the release pipeline faster.

Better manage unplanned work

Unplanned work is a reality that every team faces–a reality that most often impacts team productivity. With established processes and clear prioritization, development and operations teams can better manage unplanned work while continuing to focus on planned work.

Transitioning and prioritizing unplanned work across different teams and systems is inefficient and distracts from work at hand. However, through raised visibility and proactive retrospection, teams can better anticipate and share unplanned work.

Teams who fully embrace DevOps practices work smarter and faster, and deliver better quality to their customers. The increased use of automation and cross-functional collaboration reduces complexity and errors, which in turn improves the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) when incidents and outages occur.

Ian Buchanan

Ian Buchanan is a Principal Solutions Engineer for DevOps at Atlassian where he focuses on the emerging DevOps community and the application of Jira, Bitbucket, and Bamboo for better continuous integration and continuous delivery. While Ian Buchanan has broad and deep experience with both Java and .NET, he is best known as a champion of lean and agile practices in large enterprises.

During his career, he has successfully managed enterprise software development tools in all phases of their lifecycle, from cradle to grave. He has driven organization-wide process improvement with results of greater productivity, higher quality, and improved customer satisfaction. He has built multi-national agile teams that value self-direction and self-organization. When not speaking or coding, you are likely to find Ian indulging his passions in parsers, meta-programming, and domain-specific languages.