DevOps is a combination of development and operations, two different practices and a set of principles merged into one. The combination of development and operations teams allows for improvement in collaboration and project delivery with a focus on increasing the overall efficiency of product development and deployment. The idea is to break down different silos of the two teams and further integrate the two through a culture of continuous cross-functional support, communication and projects together. There are the main areas that the two teams collectively collaborate together:
- Collaboration and Communication: The two teams emphasize the overall need for collaboration and effective communication to closely work together in order to ensure smooth deployment of new products, processes or services.
- An example of a collaboration tool could be a company-wide used chat system to quickly send ideas, feedback and set meetings to further discuss the progress of a project.
- Continuous Integration (CI): CI involves technology and code mostly, but can be further applied outside of technology as a process of regularly merging and testing specific features, values or modifications to ensure that they all work together well as a whole product.
- A non-technology example of how continuous integration could be applied is if there was a team of writers working together on a book. Each of them could be responsible for a different chapter to contribute to the overall book, but there would still be a need for continuous integration for the chapters to read cohesively and maintain the same quality to read as a whole product in the final book.
- Continuous Delivery (CD) is also a term commonly used in the software industry but is an important concept that can also be transferred and applied in different markets, A non-technology definition of CD is a practice of efficiently and consistently delivering updates or changes to a product or service to ensure they are thoroughly tested and ready to use by the intended audience.
- An example of how continuous delivery could be implemented in a non-tech setting could be a bakery that wants to implement CD principles to ensure timely and high-quality cake deliveries. The areas that would be focused on would include streamlining the production process, the frequency of order intake, automation in production where possible, testing and quality assurance in the cakes, efficient delivery and customer feedback and improvement suggestions.
- Continuous Improvement is another aspect of DevOps that promotes a culture of always improving by collecting feedback, analyzing performance analytics and implementing processes and changes for the product, process or service to improve and increase their overall goal to the company and the consumer.
- An example of how continuous improvement could be applied in a non-technology-related setting and in another industry would be a restaurant that wants to implement continuous improvement practices to increase overall customer satisfaction with their dining experience. In order to implement this, the restaurant would need to gather feedback from the customers, identify the areas for improvement, set improvement goals, implement changes, monitor and measure how these changes improve the overall customer satisfaction rate, evaluate the final results and the repeat the cycle continues until the restaurant has achieved the goal they have set of increasing the customer satisfaction of their business.
