I’m a big believer in the value of “real” DevOps - culture, collaboration, breakdown of silos, etc.

But the lack of a formal definition has often made it feel challenging to explain, particularly as it’s so widely and often superficially used - “our ops team is now the devops team” etc.

I’ve finally found an introduction and explanation I want to share:

“The DevOps Phenomenon - An executive crash course” by Anna Wiedemann, Nicole Forsgren, Manuel Wiesche, Heiko Gewald, and Helmut Krcmar is excellent.

It covers some of the problems with traditional project management, state-of-the-art research and practice, practical challenges and opportunities, and more.

From the conclusion:

DevOps is about providing guidelines for faster time to market of new software features and achieving a higher level of stability. Implementing cross-functional, product-oriented teams helps bridge the gaps between software development and operations. By ensuring their transformations include all of the principles outlined in CALMS (culture, automation, lean, metrics, and sharing), teams can achieve superior performance and deliver value to their organizations. DevOps is often challenging, but stories from across the industry show that many organizations have already overcome the early hurdles and plan to continue their progress, citing the value to their organizations and the benefits to their engineers.