The need for Systems Thinking in DevOps!

The advent of DevOps skills which is nothing but the combined package of Development and Operations that promises to deliver the promised result at the earliest possible time-frame. There are several core principles in DevOps that intends to complete a software product development faster and with minimal bugs. One of the crucial principles is ‘System Thinking’.

Typically, a Development and Operations organization will be determined to think in terms of systems. That is a system that is a set of processes capable of working together towards a common goal. DevOps organization in general, want a system to be the business itself; not specific teams or departments. To successfully develop a reliable software, the development system can entail many different processes and procedures. A dedicated team of programmers has to write the software code, software testers will then test the code, and then the operations provisions the required infrastructure for the code making it to successfully run and serve the purpose of the consumer. There can be hundreds or thousands of people and processes involved here.

DevOps is meant to explore the strategies and notice how your actions may affect not only you or your team but the entire system. This unveils the information that might have more visibility into the full lifecycle of a piece of code she wrote. It also means being more aware of the crucial ramifications of that modification rather than being able to forget about the modification after the code commit. It could also mean a system administrator completely understanding the performance impact on an application once released to the customer. Systems thinking is nothing but means that each team should be aware of the actions of every team in the pipeline and ultimately the customer.

Systems thinking is also a bright strategy to think about blame as well. In a typical business environment, if someone pushed a piece of code out to production, that caused a major service outage, they'd be crucified by their existing peers and their management. They'd be singled out, criticized and fired. Systems thinking removes such kind of threat where that the initial inclination for individual blame is eliminated. It's about not blaming the individual that might have been unfortunate enough to push the button but the system that allowed it to happen in the first place.

According to Systems thinking principle, any such software failures are not considered as an individual error but as a failure of the system. DevOps organizations investigate the cause and effect instantaneously and not by the person who did it but by how it even got to production in the first place. In this case, they may look into why their automated testing did not catch this.