Hi, I’m John Rofrano, Senior Technical Staff Member, and DevOps Champion at IBM Research,
and I’d like to welcome you to Introduction to DevOps.
This course will help you understand the cultural, as well as technological, transformation
that is required to not only make your DevOps initiative successful but allow it to flourish.
According to a recent DevOps Institute report, demand for DevOps skills are expected to grow 122%
over the next five years, making it one of the fastest-growing skills in the workforce.
Unfortunately, having skills alone won’t ensure success.
Gartner predicts that through 2022, 75% of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet
expectations due to issues around organizational learning and change.
I can’t stress enough, the number one reason for failing to meet expectations is not around skills,
it’s not around tools, but due to issues around organizational learning and cultural change.
Cultural change can have a significant positive effect on DevOps's success.
According to George Spafford, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner,
“People-related factors tend to be the greatest challenges—not technology.”
You see, DevOps is not a tool. DevOps is not a job title.
DevOps is the practice of development and operations engineers working together through
the entire software development lifecycle, following Lean and
Agile principles that allow them to deliver software in a rapid and continuous manner.
If you want to do it fast …and you want to do it continuously, then you need to
adopt a shared mindset that is at the heart of the DevOps culture.
So, how do you change a culture?
In order to change your culture, you need to learn new ways of how to think,
how to work, how to organize, and how to measure.
Throughout this course, we will look at how businesses are being affected by disruption
and how a DevOps culture can help.
We’ll cover thinking differently through social coding and improving software reuse and sharing.
We will learn about ideas from Lean manufacturing such as working in small
batches to reduce waste, creating minimum viable products to gain valuable insight.
We will explore working differently by using test-driven and behavior-driven development
techniques to ensure repeatable behavior and high code quality.
You will see how adopting Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery practices ensure that
every change contributes to a potentially shippable feature.
But… “Tools are not the solution to a cultural problem.”
According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report by the DevOps Research
and Assessment (DORA) team, which, by the way,
represents seven years of research and data from more than 32,000 professionals worldwide:
“Team culture makes a large difference to a team’s ability
to deliver software and meet or exceed their organizational goals.”
In order to change your culture, you’ll need to organize your teams differently because how you
organize directly impacts the architecture and design of the products that you produce.
You know, humans have a knack for figuring out what behavior is rewarded,
and then doing—or at least pretending to do—that rewarded behavior.
The last cultural change we will discuss is measuring differently,
and how changing your measurement system to encourage the correct behavior
is critical for your success because you get what you measure.
We’ll also look at how to avoid being fooled by vanity metrics and how you
can use actionable metrics to gain valuable insight about your product and your customers.
Implementing a DevOps initiative isn’t easy, but it can be very, very rewarding. In order
to really embrace the DevOps culture, you have to be willing to make changes… lots of changes.
You must be willing to experiment and understand that it’s okay if an experiment fails
because “every failure is a learning opportunity.”
So, fail fast.
You need to foster the core values of teamwork, accountability, and trust.
So, join me in exploring how you can transform the culture and technology of
your organization so that your DevOps journey will be a successful one.
Watch the videos, take the quizzes, and interact with your peers on the forums
because DevOps is a team sport, and collaboration is encouraged.
I like to say:
We don’t “do” DevOps… we “become” DevOps!