DevOps Pidgin
One of the most confusing things for me in DevOps is that the players and vendors come from such different backgrounds that they use different language to describe similar concepts. Choosing the right terminology seems to have a critical implication. It will appeal to certain target audiences and be a turn off for others, it will make sense to some and be Chinese to others.
A short correspondence I had yesterday made me realize: DevOps looks to me like a new land, a melting pot of tools that came from their old-world silos and were suddenly thrown into the reality of immigrants.
You come from dev-land? Good for you, these are the first class immigrants of DevOps (English speakers? He he…). They call the shots, and have a huge influence on the language. Everyone is trying to keep up. But when the dev-land people try to define the new world, they sometimes forget that they are not alone, and it’s not only about them. They also tend to forget that there some important skills that they are missing, despite having a monopoly on coding, which is the bread and butter of DevOps land. Don’t you think they will have to learn to be more inclusive just like everyone else (in the spirit of June pride)?
If you’re originally from Test-land, oh test.... Everyone appreciates the hardships you went through, but they really want to explain to you that there is not much room for you in the new land, because the dev-land guys already know everything you can ever hope to learn and can easily take over it. Test-land people can try to explain that they bring valuable experience and ideas from the old world (plus they have started doing AI!). Tough luck. With their broken English, the other guys just think they are slow.
If you come from Ops – well… the guys from dev-land are a bit afraid of Ops. They don’t feel as confident around them, since Ops-land people got some old-land glory. They have a scar or two from big production battles that the conceit softies prefer to tackle only in theory. Or just ignore. So they will accept some of the Ops language, and start looking for other words for it – because dev-land people sometimes think that the challenges Ops-landers keep talking about are a result of the backwards way they did things in the old land.
On a flight to Austin a couple of days ago I read about Hawaii pidgin language (it was on a Southwest flight, and on the same flight the oxygen masks were deployed by accident, which could indicate test-land guys may be needed after all! But don’t worry, Southwest gave everyone a $200 voucher for the psychological damage). Pidgin is a grammatically simplified way of communication that develops between groups that don’t have a language in common. It feels like what’s happening in DevOps right now is Pidgin.
While I decide how I feel about this, can someone please explain to me the difference between “pipeline tool”, “CI/CD tool” and “Value stream tool”? is “DevOps process” the same thing as “DevOps lifecycle”? Does “application development and release” encompasses everything between dev and production? I’m serious, if you have an opinion about this please say something.
