A DevOps approach must be specifically tailored to an organization, team, and project to reflect the business needs of the organization and the goals of the project.

Software developers focus on topics such as programming, architecture, and implementation of product features. The operations team, conversely, focuses on hosting, deployment, and system sustainment. All professionals naturally consider their area of expertise first and foremost when discussing a topic. For example, when discussing a new feature a developer may first think "How can I implement that in the existing code base?" whereas an operations engineer may initially consider "How could that affect the load on our servers?"

When an organization places operations engineers on a project team alongside developers, it ensures that both perspectives will equally influence the final product. This is a cultural declaration that in addition to dev-centric attributes (such as features, performance, and reusability), ops-centric quality attributes (such as deployability and maintainability) will be high-priority.

Likewise, if an organization wants security to be a first-class quality attribute, a team member with primary expertise in information security should be devoted to the project team.

Every Thursday, the SEI Blog will publish a new blog post that will offer guidelines and practical advice to organizations seeking to adopt DevOps.

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