Devops, SRE, SDLC,... Work Salad

The meaning of words change with time and context. This is no more apparent than in fast moving industries such as technology where it can seem like a term’s meaning changes with every conversation. Throughout my career I’ve found the fixation that some people have on the correct use of a term both distracting and irritating. Example, abound; Agile, Devops, SRE, and on and on. Often these terms start with clear but deliberately open meanings. Then the marketing and HR crew move in and through a combination of ignorance and indolence they start using these terms indiscriminately, turning them from useful generalities to useless buzzwords.

Let’s take the current term du jour ‘devops’. Originally credited to Shafer and Debois from their 2008 Agile Toronto talk, a pithy compound referring to the movement toward Agile and increased automation throughout the development and operations life-cycle of IT systems, it has become so bastardised today that it has lost much of its power. Worse it has become the subject of the fruitless ‘word battle’, an endless (and endlessly tedious) series of exchanges between various groups who choose, often subtly, different interpretations.

So much heat is generated debating the ‘correct’ meaning that participants miss the light that was the original objective, namely to draw attention to a set of tools (as in means, rather than specific applications) to improve an organisations response to a change in business environment.

My view is that it is best to avoid these now contentious terms and simply get on with the tasks they originally set out to describe. Avoid ‘Agile’ or ‘Devops’, instead just favour working systems over documentation and automate away all tasks as soon as practicable (and yes, I know that this overly brief characterisation invites the pedants and word-warriors to tell me where I’m using their favourite term incorrectly. To these factions I say, ‘go away, I’m not interested’—that’s the polite version).

All this said, it is often useful to use these terms as ‘clickbait’ in titles :), just avoid succumbing to the temptation to engage in pointless exchanges about precisely what is and is not ‘devops’ (or whatever other term is being debated). Ask yourself ‘what problem is this addressing’, if the answer is nothing more productive than ‘arguing over meaning’ then your wasting precious time.