DevOps refers to a series of practices performed to perform automated software development processes. It is a conjugation of the term “development” and “operations” to emphasize how functions integrate across IT teams. DevOps strategies promote seamless building, testing, and deployment of products. It aims to bridge a gap between development and operations teams to streamline the development altogether.
Defining DevOps
A DevOps engineer completes a seamless cloud infrastructure of any business.
Without them on your IT team, you cannot establish a cloud infrastructure that is powerful enough to stand in a hybrid environment.
DevOps engineering is a newly emerging role in the business landscape. It develops into a product of a dynamic workforce that is yet to flourish.
For this reason, a majority of businesses have not yet established a clear career path to DevOps engineering roles.
To fully define what encompasses DevOps engineering, one must understand what it takes to be one.
The collaboration between teams paves the way for quick integration and deployment of software and product.
With DevOps, IT teams can produce innovative solutions and deliver high-value products more efficiently.
What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?
A majority of DevOps engineering roles are focused on introducing tools and processes that streamline software development.
Simply put, DevOps engineers are there from start to finish.
This title means that they manage software development from coding and deployment to maintenance and updates.
They collaborate with developers, programmers, and QA specialists when working on one product.
The DevOps Engineer unifies the team to take necessary actions that ensure the quality and prioritize the seamless customer experience.
Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer
DevOps engineers are responsible for the IT infrastructure throughout the software development cycle.
Typically, DevOps engineers handle the following tasks:
They should maintain continuous integration and continuous delivery using appropriate tools when testing, building, and deploying a product.
Successful DevOps engineers have access to the leading tools and technologies that address the needs of the company.
A skillful DevOps engineer knows ways to automate testing, deployment, and monitoring of code.
They should be able to coordinate across IT teams to address concerns that answer to customer expectations.
Skills of a Promising DevOps Engineer
DevOps engineers aim to bridge the gap between development and operations teams.
In bringing these IT functions together, they can deploy products that consumers find valuable.
DevOps engineers must possess considerable skills that they can bring to the table to emphasize an agile methodology.
DevOps engineers must have familiarity with the most common tools utilized in the industry.
To stay in-demand, they should have extensive knowledge in hosting applications of Linux operating systems.
They should also know how to run configuration management tools like Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.
These tools play a fundamental role in the automation of processes and infrastructure provisioning.
Moreover, DevOps engineering roles are all hands on deck when it comes to automation and infrastructure management.
Apart from their access to complex tools, they should have impeccable interpersonal skills.
They foster a collaborative partnership across IT functions, so they should know how to approach them.
A Look at a Comprehensive DevOps Team
If you are looking to augment a comprehensive DevOps team to your existing IT functions, you might want to look into the following roles:
Release Manager
A DevOps team needs to have a release manager who will handle the process and deployment.
They are the ones who will make plans, prepare schedules, and monitor the entire process to ensure it runs seamlessly.
Simply put, release managers carry out the tasks that the team performs to streamline the process. Without them, the development and operations team cannot function in unison.
Release managers are especially vital during the deployment of the product.
They have the final say whether the current build of the software is suitable for release.
It is their responsibility to check the software’s quality using the CI/CD pipeline and check issues.
Automation Engineer
Automation engineers make use of the CI/CD pipeline to streamline the software development process.
They deploy CI/CD to implement specific changes more efficiently.
Automation engineers are the ones who create and maintain the CI/CD pipeline to facilitate the real-time implementation of code modifications.
For this reason, automation engineers rely on CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Maven, Git, and more.
Software Tester
Software testers are responsible for monitoring and fixing any error surrounding the code.
When any error gets overlooked, it can compromise the quality of the product.
The worst-case scenario is that users cannot utilize the software’s key features because of a minute bug.
Software testers come into the picture soon after developing the product to monitor for any occurring bugs and errors.
They test all aspects of the software to check for anything wrong with it.
From the design, certain situations that test user experience, to the features make sure that the software is seamless.
Additionally, it is the software tester’s responsibility to verify the cohesiveness of the code and its functionality.
It has to meet the release manager’s standards before the product launches to the public.
Integration Specialist
The integration specialist plays a fundamental role in the DevOps ecosystem.
They ensure that infrastructure requirements get fulfilled using integration and testing strategies.
These specialists utilize an agile methodology to support automation processes and engineering procedures.
SecDevOps Engineer
DevSecOps is a set of disciplines combining development, security, and operations. It is a philosophy that helps software development businesses deliver innovative products quickly without sacrificing security. This allows potential security issues to be identified during the development process – and not after the product has been released in line with the emergence of continuous software development practices.
SecDevOps engineers manage the security of the software.
It is their job to ensure that the tools used are secured, from configuration management to log management to Quality Assurance.
They usually follow security protocols established by the business as their guide. Simply, SecDevOps engineers ensure that every member of the team adheres to the guidelines.
Finally, DevOps engineers possess the right amount of balance in cross-functional IT teams.
They are not confined to a particular position, as they should coordinate the development and operations team to streamline software development.
These requirements mean that the job title is all-inclusive and requires an extremely skilled and versatile developer to execute this role successfully.
Which are the main roles within DevOps Engineering?
A majority of DevOps engineering roles are focused on introducing tools and processes that streamline software development. DevOps engineers are responsible for the IT infrastructure throughout the software development cycle to bridge the gap between development and operations teams.
AIOps is the application of artificial intelligence to IT operations. It has become particularly useful for modern IT management in hybridized, distributed, and dynamic environments. AIOps has become a key operational component of modern digital-based organizations, built around software and algorithms.
Agile started as a lightweight development method compared to heavyweight software development, which is the core paradigm of the previous decades of software development. By 2001 the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born as a set of principles that defined the new paradigm for software development as a continuous iteration. This would also influence the way of doing business.
Agile Program Management is a means of managing, planning, and coordinating interrelated work in such a way that value delivery is emphasized for all key stakeholders. Agile Program Management (AgilePgM) is a disciplined yet flexible agile approach to managing transformational change within an organization.
Agile project management (APM) is a strategy that breaks large projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. In the APM methodology, each project is completed in small sections – often referred to as iterations. Each iteration is completed according to its project life cycle, beginning with the initial design and progressing to testing and then quality assurance.
Agile Modeling (AM) is a methodology for modeling and documenting software-based systems. Agile Modeling is critical to the rapid and continuous delivery of software. It is a collection of values, principles, and practices that guide effective, lightweight software modeling.
Agile Business Analysis (AgileBA) is certification in the form of guidance and training for business analysts seeking to work in agile environments. To support this shift, AgileBA also helps the business analyst relate Agile projects to a wider organizational mission or strategy. To ensure that analysts have the necessary skills and expertise, AgileBA certification was developed.
Agile leadership is the embodiment of agile manifesto principles by a manager or management team. Agile leadership impacts two important levels of a business. The structural level defines the roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. The behavioral level describes the actions leaders exhibit to others based on agile principles.
Bimodal Portfolio Management (BimodalPfM) helps an organization manage both agile and traditional portfolios concurrently. Bimodal Portfolio Management – sometimes referred to as bimodal development – was coined by research and advisory company Gartner. The firm argued that many agile organizations still needed to run some aspects of their operations using traditional delivery models.
Business innovation is about creating new opportunities for an organization to reinvent its core offerings, revenue streams, and enhance the value proposition for existing or new customers, thus renewing its whole business model. Business innovation springs by understanding the structure of the market, thus adapting or anticipating those changes.
Business modelinnovation is about increasing the success of an organization with existing products and technologies by crafting a compelling value proposition able to propel a new business model to scale up customers and create a lasting competitive advantage. And it all starts by mastering the key customers.
A consumer brand company like Procter & Gamble (P&G) defines “Constructive Disruption” as: a willingness to change, adapt, and create new trends and technologies that will shape our industry for the future. According to P&G, it moves around four pillars: lean innovation, brand building, supply chain, and digitalization & data analytics.
That is a process that requires a continuous feedback loop to develop a valuable product and build a viable business model. Continuous innovation is a mindset where products and services are designed and delivered to tune them around the customers’ problem and not the technical solution of its founders.
A design sprint is a proven five-day process where critical business questions are answered through speedy design and prototyping, focusing on the end-user. A design sprint starts with a weekly challenge that should finish with a prototype, test at the end, and therefore a lesson learned to be iterated.
Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO, defined design thinking as “a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” Therefore, desirability, feasibility, and viability are balanced to solve critical problems.
DevOps refers to a series of practices performed to perform automated software development processes. It is a conjugation of the term “development” and “operations” to emphasize how functions integrate across IT teams. DevOps strategies promote seamless building, testing, and deployment of products. It aims to bridge a gap between development and operations teams to streamline the development altogether.
Product discovery is a critical part of agile methodologies, as its aim is to ensure that products customers love are built. Product discovery involves learning through a raft of methods, including design thinking, lean start-up, and A/B testing to name a few. Dual Track Agile is an agile methodology containing two separate tracks: the “discovery” track and the “delivery” track.
Feature-Driven Development is a pragmatic software process that is client and architecture-centric. Feature-Driven Development (FDD) is an agile software development model that organizes workflow according to which features need to be developed next.
eXtreme Programming was developed in the late 1990s by Ken Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Ward Cunningham. During this time, the trio was working on the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System (C3) to help manage the company payroll system. eXtreme Programming (XP) is a software development methodology. It is designed to improve software quality and the ability of software to adapt to changing customer needs.
The ICE Scoring Model is an agile methodology that prioritizes features using data according to three components: impact, confidence, and ease of implementation. The ICE Scoring Model was initially created by author and growth expert Sean Ellis to help companies expand. Today, the model is broadly used to prioritize projects, features, initiatives, and rollouts. It is ideally suited for early-stage product development where there is a continuous flow of ideas and momentum must be maintained.
An innovation funnel is a tool or process ensuring only the best ideas are executed. In a metaphorical sense, the funnel screens innovative ideas for viability so that only the best products, processes, or business models are launched to the market. An innovation funnel provides a framework for the screening and testing of innovative ideas for viability.
According to how well defined is the problem and how well defined the domain, we have four main types of innovations: basic research (problem and domain or not well defined); breakthrough innovation (domain is not well defined, the problem is well defined); sustaining innovation (both problem and domain are well defined); and disruptive innovation (domain is well defined, the problem is not well defined).
The innovation loop is a methodology/framework derived from the Bell Labs, which produced innovation at scale throughout the 20th century. They learned how to leverage a hybrid innovation management model based on science, invention, engineering, and manufacturing at scale. By leveraging individual genius, creativity, and small/large groups.
The Agile methodology has been primarily thought of for software development (and other business disciplines have also adopted it). Lean thinking is a process improvement technique where teams prioritize the value streams to improve it continuously. Both methodologies look at the customer as the key driver to improvement and waste reduction. Both methodologies look at improvement as something continuous.
A startup company is a high-tech business that tries to build a scalable business model in tech-driven industries. A startup company usually follows a lean methodology, where continuous innovation, driven by built-in viral loops is the rule. Thus, driving growth and building network effects as a consequence of this strategy.
Kanban is a lean manufacturing framework first developed by Toyota in the late 1940s. The Kanban framework is a means of visualizing work as it moves through identifying potential bottlenecks. It does that through a process called just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing to optimize engineering processes, speed up manufacturing products, and improve the go-to-market strategy.
RAD was first introduced by author and consultant James Martin in 1991. Martin recognized and then took advantage of the endless malleability of software in designing development models. Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a methodology focusing on delivering rapidly through continuous feedback and frequent iterations.
Scaled Agile Lean Development (ScALeD) helps businesses discover a balanced approach to agile transition and scaling questions. The ScALed approach helps businesses successfully respond to change. Inspired by a combination of lean and agile values, ScALed is practitioner-based and can be completed through various agile frameworks and practices.
The Spotify Model is an autonomous approach to scaling agile, focusing on culture communication, accountability, and quality. The Spotify model was first recognized in 2012 after Henrik Kniberg, and Anders Ivarsson released a white paper detailing how streaming company Spotify approached agility. Therefore, the Spotify model represents an evolution of agile.
As the name suggests, TDD is a test-driven technique for delivering high-quality software rapidly and sustainably. It is an iterative approach based on the idea that a failing test should be written before any code for a feature or function is written. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an approach to software development that relies on very short development cycles.
Timeboxing is a simple yet powerful time-management technique for improving productivity. Timeboxing describes the process of proactively scheduling a block of time to spend on a task in the future. It was first described by author James Martin in a book about agile software development.
Scrum is a methodology co-created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland for effective team collaboration on complex products. Scrum was primarily thought for software development projects to deliver new software capability every 2-4 weeks. It is a sub-group of agile also used in project management to improve startups’ productivity.
Scrumban is a project management framework that is a hybrid of two popular agile methodologies: Scrum and Kanban. Scrumban is a popular approach to helping businesses focus on the right strategic tasks while simultaneously strengthening their processes.
Scrum anti-patterns describe any attractive, easy-to-implement solution that ultimately makes a problem worse. Therefore, these are the practice not to follow to prevent issues from emerging. Some classic examples of scrum anti-patterns comprise absent product owners, pre-assigned tickets (making individuals work in isolation), and discounting retrospectives (where review meetings are not useful to really make improvements).
Scrum at Scale (Scrum@Scale) is a framework that Scrum teams use to address complex problems and deliver high-value products. Scrum at Scale was created through a joint venture between the Scrum Alliance and Scrum Inc. The joint venture was overseen by Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of Scrum and one of the principal authors of the Agile Manifesto.
Stretch objectives describe any task an agile team plans to complete without expressly committing to do so. Teams incorporate stretch objectives during a Sprint or Program Increment (PI) as part of Scaled Agile. They are used when the agile team is unsure of its capacity to attain an objective. Therefore, stretch objectives are instead outcomes that, while extremely desirable, are not the difference between the success or failure of each sprint.
The waterfall model was first described by Herbert D. Benington in 1956 during a presentation about the software used in radar imaging during the Cold War. Since there were no knowledge-based, creative software development strategies at the time, the waterfall method became standard practice. The waterfall model is a linear and sequential project management framework.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
