The Arc-E-Tect's Predictions for 2017 - DevOps and Scrum [5/10]

The Arc-E-Tect's Prediction on DevOps and Scrum

It's 2017, meaning 2016 is a done deal, and most of my predictions for 2016 I made about a year ago and never got around documenting in any form have proven to be absolutely bogus. Which leads me to come up with my predictions for 2017 and properly document them. So continue your effort reading this post and hopefully you'll enjoy reading them. Unfortunately we'll have to wait for about a year to find out to what extent I got it all right, but for now, ...DevOps

Why DevOps? Because finally IT is considered a money maker instead of a business enabler. And it's about time.

DevOps in, Scrum out

I can be very short about this. Business has finally come to understand that IT is not something that enables them to deliver new products to their customers but instead IT is what they deliver to their customers. IT has become a product, and therefore an immediate business concern.

Gone will be the days that there is a clear separation between business teams and IT departments.

But before we get there, we need to get rid of the silos between development and operations. Ever shorter release cycles will ensure that everybody will understand that the developer is the operator in order to sustain short feedback cycles.
Because of the short release cycles, it will be possible to 'tune' software that is already in production. Tweaking it until it is as good as needed. Less time is spend on assumed correctness and more time on proven awesomeness. This can only be done by removing all unnecessary links between the consumer and the producer, i.e. the user and the developer.

The business will be requiring that less time evaporates between explaining a new feature and starting to get revenue from that feature. A shift from 'potentially shippable' to 'in the hands of the user' as the definition of done, will mean that we stop thinking about how to create great software that is needed and usable and start thinking about how to get somebody actually using that software.

A 'Product mindset' is a prerequisite for this shift, and abandoning a 'Project mindset' comes with it. I blogged about the consequences of this here. And in 2017 we will start seeing this happening all over the place.


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Arc-E-Tect