The concept of DevOps is missing one really important thing

There’s a concept that’s building a buzz across all digital industries – you may’ve heard of it – it’s a little thing called DevOps. Someone (most probably a tester) decided to extend it and now you might even hear the #DevTestOps moniker being mentioned.

In the ultimate of undeserved acknowledgements, I even get a reference on Wikipedia’s DevOps page. It references this DevOps life-cycle diagram from an earlier post that I can take no credit for:

However, there is one really important chevron missing from the DevOps infinite loop above. Can you picture what it might be?

If I show you this time series below, does it help identify what’s missing from the DevOps infinite loop? I refer to the diagram below as The Tech-Debt Wreck
The increasing percentage of tech debt
If I give you a hint that it primarily relates to the grey band in the time series above, would that help?

Okay, okay. I’m sure you’ve guessed it already, but the big thing missing from the DevOps loop is pruning, or what I refer to as subtraction projects (others might call it re-factoring). Without pruning, the rapid release mantra of DevOps will take the digital world from t0 to t0+100 faster than at any time before in our history.

As a result, I’m advocating a variation on DevOps… or DevTestOps even… I want you to preach a revised version of the label – let’s start a movement called #DevTestPruneOps. Actually, the pruning should go at the start, before each dev / test cycle, but by calling it #PruneDevTestOps, I fear its lineage might get lost.

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