DevOps programs were traditionally assigned to the more technical groups of an organization, where they were incubated and nurtured by a devoted family of tech leads and operations experts. This initial positioning succeeded in removing troublesome bottlenecks, improving quality and advancing software delivery practices. A win for sure, but won and done ? Hardly.

The natural extension of early DevOps is found in our more recent industry focus on Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. CI/CD expands the principals and practices of DevOps from their traditional home in latter phases of software delivery, to a cyclical view which starts at the earliest stage of ideation and continues all the way to the harvesting of value – each iteration being an important feedback and learning loop.

Harnessing CI/CD to enable continuous learning requires additional, non-technical agile competencies, expanding our DevOps focus beyond the traditional domains of branching strategies, code trunks, builds, scripts and packages. Organizations pursuing the benefits of more continuous flow and feedback will need to advance lean agile understanding and competency in earlier functions of portfolio and product management, where business opportunity is deliberated and investment decisions are made. Equally, our work is not done with the delivery of valuable software. How value is harvested, or not, is critical data to be used in testing of our hypotheses.