Should it be “BizDevTestOps” instead?
DevOps has certainly gained attention over the past few years as “the next thing” after Cloud had gained traction in IT circles about 5 years ago. When you read various books and articles written about DevOps and Continuous Delivery you begin to see that DevOps is an abbreviation for what really needs to happen in IT organizations that are organizing themselves to be able to deliver business value in ever decreasing timeframes. It can be argued that the catchphrase should be “BizDevTestOps” instead.
Why? Because IT should begin all efforts with addressing the needs of the business they serve. IT units that fail to understand business requirements should not be surprised that business units within their firms would seek out alternatives like outsourcing or services from sources like Azure or AWS. Investing time in working directly with the business side will pay great dividends to you and the business you service. Once requirements are understood then Agile development teams quickly deliver code that meets requirements in small batches of functionality.
But before that code is allowed to be pushed into a build, Quality Assurance teams test the code for defects, adherence to coding standards, functionality, security issues, performance, user experience and suitability for mobile platforms if the application is to run on tablets or smartphones. This amount of testing may sound extreme, but in an era where applications are deleted from mobile devices within minutes of the user finding defects, performance or usability issues, thorough testing cannot be taken for granted. The faster you get through all phases of testing, the better because if you can get feedback quickly back to the developers that wrote the code, the easier it will be for them to fix the code because the code is still fresh in the minds of the developers that created the code. Thus a high degree of test automation is absolutely required.
Operations teams need to support all phases of BizDevTestOps. Data center automation and cloud solutions enable Operations to quickly and accurately create platforms, complete with everything needed for development and testing phases – hardware, virtualized resources, operating systems, middleware, databases, security, web services and software tooling – all ordered up via a Service Catalog that also tracks costs that are allocated to specific business units. Feedback loops for Business, Development and Testing units originate from systems that the Operations team implements, maintains and monitors.
Getting all IT units to cooperate, break down walls, eliminate manual steps in processes, create feedback mechanisms and get feedback into everyone’s hands as quickly as possible is crucial for the success of BizDevTestOps. Many organizations working on initiatives like this realize that this may be the hardest part of rolling out this strategy. It may take several years and many tweaks to iron out issues and to optimize processes. This “social” component may indeed be the hardest part of the journey.
Thus BizDevTestOps describes what needs to happen the best while “DevOps” is a nice shorthand way of saying it. But knowing how our business loves two, three and four letter abbreviations perhaps it would be shortened to “BDTO”?
