In IT, we love our frameworks. Whether agile, ITIL, lean, cobit, six sigma or others, our thirst for “best practice” guidance seems to be unquenchable.
The concept of a “best practice” is an enigma. Who decides if a practice is actually the best? And best for whom? While an “adopt and adapt” mentality is advocated in most frameworks, there is still a tendency to benchmark efforts against and conform to published best practices. Whether promoting “best in breed,” “world-class,” or “best practices,” many organizations swing these terms around as some form of competitive advantage.
Is it really? Shouldn’t business outcomes be the real competitive advantage and measure whether IT’s practices are really the “best” to meet customer requirements?
The DevOps Institute was founded in 2015 as a global learning community for emerging DevOps practices. Since our launch, we have intentionally avoided any reference to DevOps “best practices.”
We believe that DevOps practices are constantly emerging and, in many cases, being proven in the wild.
Through research, interviews, conferences and the experience of our Regents and partners, DOI’s goal is to identify, capture and share emerging DevOps practices through knowledge, education and certification models that best serve the learning community and enterprise IT. We feel it is premature to certify an individual as an “Expert” or “Master” when the expertise and mastery needed for successful DevOps is not clear and may not be appropriate in a single person.
DevOps is fairly young. It does not have a single body of knowledge. There is disagreement on whether it is a philosophy, movement or framework. Despite that, DevOps is crossing the chasm from innovators to the early majority faster than any other IT framework. Why? Perhaps it is because DevOps speaks to many of the cultural and technical challenges that IT has been amassing for years.
So instead of focusing on best practices, let’s agree on DevOps’ core principles:
- Go faster
- Shorten feedback loops
- Experiment and learn
- Cultural transformation
- Deliver business and customer value constantly and consistently
No doubt, some practices have clearly risen as being critical to the realization of DevOps’ core principles:
- Agile software development
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery pipelines
- Automated and continuous testing
- Proactive monitoring
- Improved communication and collaboration
Still, over the past year, DOI has seen additional practices gain interest
- DevSecOps/rugged DevOps
- ChatOps
- Agile service management
- Lean
- Immersion practices (Garage, Lofts, Dojos)
- DevOps teams
What will emerge next year? Who knows—but that’s the exciting part of DevOps. As time passes, there is less contradiction and more supplementation. Each emerging practice seems to complement and fine tune what came before.
Even without a standard definition, DevOps is already encouraging organizations to examine their proprietary practices, identify gaps, assess their automation and, most importantly, engage in collaborative discussions. Transformations have taken seed without defined best practices. That’s awesome! Let’s not quell the momentum by attaching a static set of best practices.
Will DevOps’ best practices eventually be agreed? Maybe. DevOps touches almost every aspect of IT management—people, practices and automation. That’s a tall order for a set best practices. Certainly some will try to publish their version of a “definitive” DevOps body of knowledge. Even “The DevOps Handbook,” an important book publishing later this year, was built as a collaborative effort between many of the early founders of the DevOps movement. Their perspective and insight will be awesome but not finite.
I understand the frustration by the lack of a single body of knowledge and prescribed best practices. In past frameworks, the body of knowledge was both a enabling tool and constraining limitation. Bodies of knowledge are difficult to keep current. For DevOps, let’s embrace the concepts of spirit of sharing, collaboration and continuous innovation by promoting an inclusive and collective body of knowledge of emerging practices.
If we settle on a set of DevOps best practices, are we actually inhibiting the very values that we are trying to instill? I hope not.
