Can Adopting DevOps Practices Be Risky?
Before making any major change at a team or organizational level, it’s important to take a step back and assess what risks you might be running by shaking things up. Listing the benefits of agile or DevOps is easy, but what about the ways in which altering your development and testing philosophy can actually disrupt production?
Let’s focus on DevOps, which purports to improve performance by enhancing collaboration between the traditional development and operations teams in your organization. Plenty of smart, experienced people preach the good word of DevOps, but you’ll often hear people worry that the frequent deployment forces a dip in overall quality.
According to Sherry Chang, the chief architect for Intel IT's DevOps initiative, this just isn’t the case. Now that people are learning how to better leverage DevOps and are adjusting to the current speed of development, you don’t have to sacrifice quality just so that you can have quicker releases.
“The 2016 State of DevOps report shows that high-performing IT organizations are able to achieve speed and stability concurrently,” Chang said in a recent interview with StickyMinds. “The bigger risk I see is people not starting and not trying. In today’s environment, standing still means falling behind.”
That’s a point that shouldn’t be taken lightly. So often, we see teams that are doing just well enough to comfortably stand still in the face of an industry-wide shift. Instead of researching agile, DevOps, waterfall, or anything else, they take what they see as the safe route and keep chugging along with what’s worked for the last decade.
But as Chang points out, refusing to see the way software development is changing might be the biggest risk of all. If you don’t adjust how your team functions and DevOps becomes an industry standard, it’ll be that much more difficult to change course and catch up with your competitors.
That doesn’t mean that change like this is easy. But it can be necessary.
“Staying with waterfall or other outdated practices mean that any non-trivial application requires heroic effort to pull it off,” Chang continued. “The new hero we need are the change agent brave enough to challenge the status quo and transform existing system to one that increase the odds of success for all.”
Can it be difficult to adopt DevOps? Absolutely. But consider the bigger risk of falling far behind within a fast-changing industry before you let DevOps scare you off.
