What’s all this noise around Developer Operations?

During the last months a huge movement is gaining more and more importance in the IT world: the DevOps one.

What we usually covered until now is the Define-Develop side of the process. We never went deep on Operate, as “these are tasks for IT guys”. Release Management is another sample of it, but we are going to cover it separately.

But as we are living in a dynamic world, things change. Microsoft started a vision of that (from the IT side to be sincere, but still a vision) in 2007. Did we get there? Not really, but so far so good.

In the picture I highlighted some of the most common issues, which almost everybody went through at least once in their career.

Non consistent tool

Is there a ‘standard’ –read ‘mainstream’ operations backlog management tool, integrated with the Engineering side? Never heard of. Almost every organization has a tool, but it is often custom, standalone and rarely integrated with the developers’ systems.

Production incidents hard to debug and resolve

Sometimes bugs happen because of production-only issues. The VS2010 momentum of “no more no-repro” was the first leap toward solving this problem, but now we need something more.

No Knowledge Base management

This is like the ‘non consistent tool’ one, but worse as almost nobody (I would say less than 25% of the companies I worked with and upon) do that.

Can’t get actionable feedback

Linked to the one on production incidents, getting actionable feedbacks is quite hard as far as now. So it’s definitely needed an improvement in this area.

There is a lot to fill the gap, as possibilities are almost endless. And there is still a lot in place, think about Lab Management and its end-to-end workflows. This is a sample of an integrated Release Management with Developer Operations, for stuff up to the QA stage. We now need to go further.

With Visual Studio 2012 we finally got the possibility of bringing all the needed information in a seamless way from production back to engineering, as we are going to see in the next posts, trying to close the gap it exists in there.

Some insights on it? SCOM, TFS, IntelliTrace. Stay tuned