DevOps has historically been understood as the sum of a collaborative business culture, tools and processes designed to close the breach between development and operation teams. The level of compliance with this working philosophy has now become a touchstone of the degree of maturity of any organization’s software development processes. Far behind now are the days when developing robust and scalable functional code was a reliable sign of doing things well.

It is now a decade since the term DevOps  (development and operations) was coined. During this time companies have been cottoning on to the benefits of this methodology and it seems by now to have reached a certain level of maturity. Recent studies* show that 29% of firms have now made the transition to a DevOps approach, with a further 54 per cent expected to make the switch over the next two years.

DevOps is a software creation methodology based on the integration of software developers and system administrators in the interests of creating better-quality, lower-cost software more quickly and with a high update rate.
What does it consist of, what benefits does it bring and how can it best be set up in organizations were some of the questions dealt with in the working lunch organized by the trade magazine Computing: “DevOps, a marriage of convenience”. Miguel Recio, Manager of the Software Development Division of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector, together with other top experts in this area, participated in the event to assess the DevOps takeup strategies, its level of maturity and speed of adoption as a collaboration model between the areas of IT operations and software development.

What are the first DevOps implementation steps?

Miguel Recio sets out three DevOps implementation steps for any organization. The first and most important is to analyze the necessary change of methodology, company culture and organization for proper integration of development and operations teams. He stressed the importance of these teams pulling together towards a common goal.

The second, equally crucial step is to set up a very powerful software ecosystem allowing for very high automation levels. The essential achievements here are continuous integration, continuous deployment and code infrastructure management.

And the third step would be early error detection. It is crucial to bring security into the initial phases of the project, empowering the Security by Design approach.