DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 2 covers BizDevOps and more.

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

DEVOPS TEAM RESPONSIVENESS TO BUSINESS NEEDS WILL ACCELERATE

Whether this term gets widely adopted or not, there is an increasing focus on ensuring DevOps teams identify and deliver business value. Managing across DevOps teams and paired with an increased focus on AI/ML-based optimization will drive value stream management practices and the increased adoption of solutions that connect all the elements of the value stream (not just software delivery) — including the demonstration of business impact. Responsiveness of product teams to business needs will accelerate as DevOps teams mature and cycle times get smaller with increased automation, complemented by more seamless communication.
Anand Ahire
Senior Director, Product Management, DevOps, ServiceNow(link is external)

BIZDEVOPS VISIBILITY EXPANDS

2021 still left many businesses impacted by looming costs due to COVID and failed Digital Transformation Initiatives. Why? How do you adjust what you can't see? The lack of visibility into Cloud Spend combined with inflation and shortage of skilled workers has created a perfect storm for automation of Release Management and renewed focus on DevOps connecting to the Cloud. There will continue to be a push for more automation of the DevOps Pipeline and Connecting it with Cloud (On & Off Premise), Containing Costs, and Controlling Compliance. The balance between Dev and Ops will continue to become a bigger issue for Business Leaders as Auditors scrutinize newer approaches to solving the visibility issues. AI combined with logging, new team/squad processes, and approaches will become front and center to solving the Visibility issue.
Jeanne Morain
Founder and Digital Transformation Catalyst, iSpeak Cloud(link is external)

"BIZDEVOPS" TERM WILL FAID AWAY

BizDevOps — I'm not interested in this or any other portmanteau words created off the back of DevOps, they're anti-patterns, and in my honest opinion will fade away as people realize the aim and purpose of practicing DevOps is not to do DevOps, or be DevOps. It's to create an organizational culture and cross-functional teams that allow organizations to deliver secure, high quality and valuable features to their customers. If a feature requires input from Biz, Fin, Dev, Sec, Ops they should all be part of the team delivering said feature. They should not be a BizFinDevSecOps team! Break down silos people, don't create them.
Jamal Walsh
Technical Product Owner, The Very Group, DevOps Institute Ambassador(link is external)

VALUE STREAM MANAGEMENT

IT teams gain a bigger seat at the table with value streams. Despite spending billions on digital transformation, global enterprises are still struggling to deliver digital value. Why? Because pieced-together point solutions can't handle the demands of enterprise organizations. Value Stream Management (VSM) promotes the use of systems-thinking to optimize the whole — not just the parts. In 2020, the pandemic made every organization realize the need to become a digital business, and since then, the accelerated rate of change has pressured organizations to become extremely agile. Accomplishing this goal requires aligning business and development value streams to operate together with a shared mission, vision, and cadence — and the secret sauce is VSM.
Florian Schouten
VP of Product Management, Digital.ai(link is external)

In the next year, we should expect to see deeper results from measurement of value. How do we actually measure value, and what does that look like in the future? At the end of the day, there shouldn't be a differentiation between IT and the business because IT creates value, and it continues to level up the conversation. When I first did value stream mapping, the biggest benefit I saw was that by looking at the efficiency of the system that supports the business, it brought everyone together and focused on the same goal. We can push that even further as we better understand what we are measuring and what it means for the organization.
Jeff Keyes
VP of Product Marketing & Strategy, Plutora(link is external)

Although DevOps bridged the gap between software development and operations, leading to faster, more consistent delivery of software products, there are still gaps to be bridged. Specifically, as technology plays a greater role in market differentiation, companies face increasing pressure to track and optimize the business value of software development activities. This trend will only grow in importance through 2022, forcing developers to optimize the value they deliver to customers by adopting more actionable metrics for software delivery performance and pursuing an overarching professionalization of the dev organization. This will also position the dev organization to better partner with and answer the questions of the C-suite as business leaders strive to understand and predict the impact of technology investments across the value stream.
Dominik Rose
VP Product Value Stream Management, LeanIX(link is external)

In the DevOps world, Value Stream Management (VSM) is able to highlight past events, identify where the bottlenecks are and share visibility that helps to provide insights into the efficiency of an enterprise software factory. The early adopters that embrace AI are going to do so in order to take these insights to the next level in 2022, asking, "Where are the bottlenecks going to be in the future?" Businesses will be able to use VSM in such a way that they can measure and gain insights into potential changes in process, development approach, or organizational changes and use the VSM dashboards to tell them what the end result will be if those changes are made. You can't solve every problem, but you can perform richer analysis and know what choices offer the most value in the end. The advantage is in being able to dial in different variables and create a game plan for how to carry out those changes.
Bob Davis
CMO, Plutora(link is external)

MORE COMPANIES ADOPT DEVOPS CULTURE

DevOps continues to grow as an interest to a wider variety of organizations. A few leaders have lots of success at building and evolving their software, but a large number of people that have adopted DevOps tooling still struggle with cultural change. I think that the next year or two will see many of these organizations either mature to change their culture and do more than just adopt tooling, or they will fall back into more siloed work in groups, with a lack of collaboration. I already see that in some clients that expected the tooling to change their culture automatically.
Steve Jones
DevOps Advocate, Redgate(link is external)

DEVELOPER RELATIONS CONNECTS DEV WITH BUSINESS

Developer Relations is still a very young field, so who knows what the future might bring. I think there's a tremendous amount of value in leaning on DevRel to provide a developer's perspective to product and marketing decisions. Developers have a large amount of influence on decision making, because they are the ones who ultimately have to live with the decisions being made. Many people see DevRel as a type of developer marketing, and there's plenty of truth in that. But I see it as an opportunity for communication to go both ways: to listen to developers and to use their feedback as a guide. I think many DevRel teams are lacking in that area, and are often too focused on outbound communication, instead of inbound. That's where I'd like to see DevRel lean more towards in the future.
Matt Groves
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Couchbase(link is external)

As the developer community continues to grow and as it becomes more ingrained in decision making for many organizations, the role of a developer relations (devrel) team or department will be more popular than ever. In the past few years, the career path of a Developer Advocate emerged and will exponentially explode in and outside of the US coming 2022. Catering to developers is becoming an increasingly competitive advantage as developers continue to increase their influence on what gets used in a company in terms of softwares, technology and services. They are also usually more vocal when it comes to things they like or not, which brings a bigger, more involved pool of people to connect with. Devrel is the perfect bridge between technology and the human: it's all about connecting with people. From marketing, to experience and success, we'll see more and more companies either implementing developer programs or experimenting with them in order to grow a community of developers which the company hopes to nurture, grow, and engage.
Jonathan Grandperrin
CEO, Mindee(link is external)

REMOTE DEVOPS

The response to COVID over the last few years has forced companies to adapt their ways of working so they can survive. The world has also realized how overlooked mental health issues are at the workplace and employers are looking for ways to create a psychologically safe workplace. The great thing is many now realize that their fears about remote working and flexible hours were unfounded and actually their teams can have a better work/life balance without compromising productivity, and in-fact they need to do this to attract talent. So what's this got to do with DevOps? Well the main tenant of DevOps is creating a culture of openness and collaboration between teams/roles so this shift in working styles now makes DevOps a natural fit in a world adapting to COVID. Companies will be happy to learn that the collaboration technologies they've put in place to enable remote and distributed working now make it much easier for Dev and Ops to come together in ways they couldn't in the past. Dev teams will pick technologies that make it easier for them to collaborate with the common purpose of building a great product for their customers.
Craig Cook
Principal Engineer, Catapult CX(link is external)

Over the last two years, traits of DevOps proficient teams such as asynchronous communications and small focused teams crossed into mainstream business. As we move post-pandemic, the re-convergence of these DevOps techniques with traditional office-based ways of working will lead to better collaboration and the best of both worlds. Companies with a focus on tools that allow visibility and traceability of source code management, software build, deployment, and operation, which has been reimagined with remote in mind, are those that will succeed with a successful blend of office-based and remote working.
Simon Haighton-Williams
CEO, Adaptavist(link is external)

DEVOPS FOR ERP

DevOps isn't just for bespoke development, it's for ERP systems, too! The benefits of time to market and reliability of change delivery make sense in key financial and production systems. The adoption of a DevOps approach may require specialized tooling, but the outcomes are essential to cost control, reliability and competitive advantage. Just as DevOps changed software development, it's changing ERP, too.
Jim Dugger
Senior Technology Evangelist, Basis Technologies

WATERFALL REFUSES TO DIE

Waterfall will continue to refuse to die. While commercial development efforts will continue to shift toward any of several methodologies based on continuous improvement, companies engaging with outside consultants will continue to demand fixed-price, fixed-term, one-and-done projects. It will keep waterfall on life support for the foreseeable future. I'm not proud to be saying this, but I'm not wrong, either.
Mike Fitzmaurice
VP of North America and Chief Evangelist, WEBCON(link is external)

Go to: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 3, covering predictions about developers.