Collaborating in DevOps Culture

Chapter 2. Collaboration in Practice

Although devops is a cultural movement and not something that can be created or purchased with specific tools, collaboration principles can be put into practice throughout the software development life cycle that can help engineering effectiveness in concrete ways.

The development pipeline is the progression of stages a product goes through, from design to delivery. No one pipeline describes every development environment, but many environments do share common patterns.

Generally, product development progresses in stages. Regardless of what methodology a team chooses to follow, people will establish a set of stages or gates to qualify whether software is ready to progress within the pipeline. In modern environments, these stages could look something like the model shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Stages in the software development life cycle

Let’s look at each stage more closely:

1. In the first stage, we have discovery. Collaborative discovery could look like a team discussing a minimum set of requirements to be delivered within a set period of time, like a week or two weeks, depending on the frequency of delivering a working feature.

2. In the second stage, we have development. Collaborative development could involve pairing on code and test development, code reviews, and work segmented into small pieces that can be accomplished within the set ...