The Value of DevOps
Summary
The value of employing DevOps is not an imagined or hoped for result. The evidence is there that the benefits to productivity and especially to employee moral and output, is already proven.
The Value of DevOps
The evidence already collected on the business value of DevOps is very persuasive, but perhaps even more persuasive is the individual human improvement in health and well-being, and in turn productivity. This can help us to see that adopting DevOps is worth the struggle it presents. We know it isn’t easy to make changes, but the results speak for themselves.
The fact of the matter
A report by Jez Humble and Gene Kim in 2013, the State of DevOps Report, showed some major improvements for companies who had adopted DevOps. Production deployments had succeeded by 60 times the previous, market capitalisation was 50%higher than three years previously, productivity and profitability goals were twice as likely to exceed themselves and mean time to restore services was 168 times faster! This is proof that DevOps breaks the conflict between departments and makes companies more reliable. Perhaps the biggest and most positive change of all was that workers were twice as likely to say their company was a great place to work.
It’s not about numbers, or is it?
Traditionally, when things go wrong, the answer has been to employ more developers, highernumbers must mean higher productivity, right? But this hasn’t worked well at all and in some cases it has actually made things worse. Adding more developers decreases productivity because of communication problems, slowing everything down. New developers coming in are faced with problems while existing developers are hostile. Evidence shows that when things are going wrong, the more team sizes increase deploys per day by developers actually go down. If we use DevOps small teams of developers are able to integrate, test and deploy changes quickly and safely without the need for increasing the number of developers. This works no matter how big the business is and even as businesses grow they can still keep their teams of developers small. And if these same businesses do increase their team of developers, as they often do, their numbers of deploys per day by developers can also increase. So it’s win-win.
Common knowledge
The struggles of workers in companies that don’t employ DevOps is no surprise to anyone who has ever worked in such a company. We can see our daily lives and struggles played out in movies, books, and TV and we recognise these people because they are us. The systems have ground workers down as problems persist and departments are pitched against each other. So a better way is beneficial to everyone, no matter at what level we work. And it’s everyone, at all levels, who will engage with the process and feel a apart of it. Personal testimonies from workers show that introducing DevOps reduces stress and increases job satisfaction and everyone feels involved in the process and valued. The financial benefit of DevOps is proven and is impressive, but it’s hard to put a price on the benefit to employees. However, we do know this is the most major benefit.