Mandi Walls - Building a DevOps Culture

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After a few years of talking about What is DevOps?, a general consensus has started to form around DevOps being a cultural movement combined with a number of software development practices that enable rapid development.

As a technical process, tools have emerged that enable teams to work more quickly and efficiently. Tools alone are not enough to create the collaborative environment that many of us refer to now as DevOps. However, creating such an environment is a huge challenge; it requires assessing and realigning how people think about their teams, the business, and the customers.

Putting together a new set of tools is simple when compared to changing organizational culture. DevOps is a departure from traditional software development practices for just this reason. By celebrating anti-social superstar developers, or allowing code to go to production that wasnt properly tested, or deciding that the only reason the code doesnt run is because Operations is stupid, we are not doing our best to enable the business and create value for our customers.

There are those among us who were doing devops before DevOps. The most successful, rewarding projects I have worked on in my career were those that had an open, professional culture, but by attaching a common vocabulary, we can give others a blueprint for adjusting their organizations culture toward one that is more DevOps-like.

The concept of organizational culture was developed in the middle of the 20th century, ostensibly by Edgar Shein at MIT Sloan. The idea that a group of people working together in a corporate environment could create a culture distinct from the greater societal culture is now fairly well accepted in many industries. IBM and Walmart are well known for having cultural characteristics that separate them from competitors, for good or bad.

Groups of people create a culture through shared values and behaviors. How we reward behaviors, how we treat those values as malleable or immutable affects how strong the organizations culture is and how well it is supported by the participants. It also affects how the members of the culture will react to attempts to modify the characteristics of that culture.

The last few years have seen a lot of discussion of what DevOps is and isnt. DevOps is as much about culture as it is about tools, and culture is all about people. No two groups of people are guaranteed to create the same sort of culture under similar circumstances. So to talk about a cultural movement in absolute terms is disingenuous. Implementing a prescribed toolchain wont magically turn your team into a DevOps team. Using DevOps-friendly tools and workflows can help your team work in a more DevOps manner, but creating a culture that is supportive of the ideals of the DevOps movement is crucial.

We added a Velocity Culture track to the 2010 Velocity Conference out of recognition that there are important cultural aspects of successfully operating large infrastructures. What is more challenging, however, is how to help aspiring DevOps cultural warriors make modifications to their organizational cultures in order to reap some of the benefits of DevOps. Cultural change in general is a topic widely discussed in business research, and we can borrow from lessons learned by other industries.

Culture, as an abstract collection of ideas and behaviors, is hard to pin down to a proscriptive set of requirements. In a technical team, its much more easy to talk about what kinds of tools to use and how to use them; the tools themselves are accessible as constructs. The people that will use those tools are complex.

The traditional friction between teams thought of as development and teams thought of as operations boils down to a few key cultural characteristics.