Goals and benefits of a DevOps culture

At this point, you might be wondering about the point of it all. What are the benefits of DevOps and what is there in it for you, your colleague, and your organization? The most common goal of adopting DevOps is to achieve a reduction in cycle time. Cycle time is the time between starting work on a new feature and the moment that the first user can use it. The way this is achieved, by automation, also serves the goals of lower change failure rate, lower Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and lower planned downtime.

Next to all that, there might also be other benefits such as increased employee satisfaction, less burnout and stress, and better employee retention. This is attributed to the removal of opposing goals between developers and operators.

For a while, there was doubt whether DevOps really works, and whether these goals were really met, and whether the extra benefits were really achieved, as this was only shown using case studies. The downside of this is that case studies are often only available for successful cases and not for unsuccessful cases. This all changed in 2018 when the book Accelerate came out. This book shows, based on years of quantitative research, that modern development practices such as DevOps really contribute to reaching IT goals and organizational goals.