DevOps is one of the very popular terminologies especially in software development companies and there are many misunderstandings about what is DevOps, is it and new Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), is it Agile or does it improve process agility, it is a role inside the team or what is the DevOps and how this can improve software delivery.

The big challenge

As we know that software after implementation and delivery, is used by the end-users inside the organization, it needs to be maintained and also operated, not only that it needs to be enhanced with the time until it is decommissioned or replaced with a new software powered by new technologies.

Most of the time, the team that manages the development, is different than who manages quality, and as well is different than who manages security, deployments, operations, and maintenance. Each team may have different objectives, leaders, and performance indicators. This led that the teams may compete more than collaborate and this often creates the blame culture and mindset.

This kind of siloed vertical disciplines inside the team, created a huge delay in the process, manual checks, and reviews, and even every team needs to deliver his work to the team after that in the process.

Whether it is Waterfall or Agile, software development contains almost the same steps, from analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, operations, and maintenance. Each SDLC deals with these steps in different ways according to the SDLC principles and planning. While most of the companies moved to Agile, they used the same team structures from Silos that every member is focusing on a specific area from these steps.

Although adopting Agile principles focus on enhancing the end-to-end development process by eliminating the issues in traditional software development lifecycles, the same challenges in managing the operations were still there and DevOps’ main purpose is to overcome those challenges.

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