Every organization is different and for most, the DevOps[1] journey isn't a smooth, straight line. There's no such thing as a "linear" DevOps journey. Rather, "there are many starts and stops along the way, which can kill early momentum and lead to cynicism."
This is one of the key takeaways from a recent surve[2]y of 3,000 IT managers and professionals conducted by Puppet and Splunk Inc., which documents the DevOps journey, from start to finish. The study was underwritten by Amazon Web Services, Cloudability, Cognizant, CyberArk, Diaxion, Eficode and Splunk.
As a refresher, DevOps is best defined as "a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably." (This nice concise definition[3] courtesy of the folks at Atlassian.) DevOps harnesses the creative energy of developers and channels it into cadenced releases as required by the business.
There is one common denominator all successful DevOps enterprises have, the researchers find -- a culture of collaboration and sharing across any and all fiefdoms. "The practices with the most significant impact across the entire DevOps evolutionary journey are dependent on sharing, one of the key pillars of DevOps," the survey reports authors state. "Organizations that have small pockets of DevOps success, yet never manage to spread that success further, are stalled and can't progress to higher levels of automation and self-service. So the business impact of their DevOps success may not be felt where it matters."
Tellingly, those higher up in organizations often think they have DevOps in force, but those people further down in the trenches don't necessarily see it that way.