Effective DevOps

Chapter 12. Tools: Accelerators of Culture

Tools are accelerators, increasing our velocity by driving change based on an organization’s current culture and direction. When we don’t understand our current position or direction, applying acceleration leads to unexpected outcomes with potentially negative impact.

The world changes rapidly; a reflexive response is to follow others in the hopes of mirroring their success. We need to take time to understand our current position, our relationships to other teams, organizations, competitors, and the world at large. This helps frame what we should currently work on, what we should delay, and what to eliminate from our environment.

In this chapter, we move beyond our examination of the current tool ecosystem and present real-world examples of how tools and culture influence and impact each other. We present these studies not to serve as specific how-tos but rather to demonstrate the different ways in which organizations evaluate, choose, and make use of tools within their environments. These studies guide and demonstrate how to reason about tooling choices, rather than recommending any particular tools as a one-size-fits-all solution to all your devops needs.

The Value of Tools to People

We have a long history of using tools to get jobs done more effectively. Moving from typewriters to word processors reduced the cost of making changes and correcting mistakes. Going from punchcards and assembly languages to higher-level languages increases ...