5 red flags: When DevOps might not be a good fit

“5 red flags: When DevOps might not be a good fit” on TechBeacon, 2/20/19.

Alan Zucker, founding principal of Project Management Essentials, a consulting and training organization, said the decision was not binary.

“I would suggest shifting the question slightly to ‘Which DevOps is right for the organization?’ rather than ‘DevOps, yes or no?'”
Alan Zucker

The DevOps principles were meant to create a set of values that companies can adopt on an as-needed basis, he explained. But there are some who have gotten very religious about having to do it a specific way, he said. It’s okay to use only a little bit of DevOps tools or processes and think critically about where each component makes sense, Zucker added.

1. Your business doesn’t need regular releases

These examples highlight DevOps red flags that might apply to your organization.

For example, Project Management Essentials’ Zucker related the story of a a student in one of his classes who worked at a large federal agency. He told Zucker his agency was considering going DevOps. When Zucker asked him about the agency’s situation and objectives, he figured out that the organization wouldn’t likely benefit from rapid and continuous deployment. “It’s a fairly stable agency, with not a whole lot of big changes coming along,” Zucker said.

He found, however, that when the organization did release software it had a very costly, painful process, and releases took weeks to get done. While a full transformation probably wouldn’t make sense in that situation, doing release automation tooling might help, Zucker said.