Introduction

The emergence of DevOps has marked a seismic shift in the software world in recent years. The allure is the opportunity it offers to organizations to increase their levels of productivity by orders of magnitude and outpace their competitors to win in the marketplace.

However, DevOps draws from a wide array of areas of research and represents their convergence into a broad set of philosophies, practices, and tools. With such a vast body of knowledge to consider, it’s hard to know where to begin when attempting to adopt it.

Fortunately, we can look to DevOps thought leaders to point us in the right direction. First introduced in The Phoenix ProjectandThe DevOps Handbook is the concept of _The Three Ways. _Itcaptures the conceptual underpinnings of the entire movement. This model is a powerful tool that identifies the characteristics of DevOps maturity and describes the path that your organization can follow to get there.

We’ll be leveraging The Three Ways in this article by examining some practical actions your organization can take while pursuing DevOps maturity. It can help when the purported benefits of DevOps seem elusive. This feeling burdens organizations that struggle with the underlying principles of DevOps.

We’ll discuss in more detail, within the context of The Three Ways to provide the insight necessary to fight past barriers to adoption. As with any cultural transformation, the adoption of DevOps requires a shift in mindset and values embodied by specific practices and approaches. This guide is a collection of ideas to get started or to strategize about potential next steps. It can be used by any technology professional at any level of your organization to accelerate or even begin its DevOps journey.

The Three Ways

The First Way

The First Way is about accelerating the pace of delivery through your value stream. It can encompass the work of an individual contributor, a team, or even an entire organization. It describes how the business defines value-creating functionality for the development organization. Development builds the software that captures the value and passes it to operations to deliver it as a service to the customer.

The arrow only points from left to right, suggesting that there is never a backward flow. The implication is that known defects never get passed downstream, never negatively impacting the whole system with local optimization, and always pursuing greater throughput by continuously unlocking a greater understanding of the system to improve it.

Figure 1. The First Way flows from left to right.

The Second Way

In The Second Way, your organization will establish a feedback loop that amplifies signals of quality and efficiency and enables the practice of continually making improvements by addressing any uncovered issues. You create a virtuous cycle of refinement, which allows a better understanding of customer needs and faster detection of problems, ideally moving to the predictive phase to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place.

Now you can begin the work of shortening the feedback cycle, which paves the way to add even more sensing mechanisms to detect weaker signals. By “sensing mechanisms,” we mean ways to inform developers or operations of issues occurring in production. “Weaker signals” refers to different characteristics of the running software that provides insight into the quality, stability, or other essential aspects of the system.

_The Second Way _helps your organization be proactive by reacting to predictive indicators of problems and addressing them before problems occur. Most of the detection mechanisms can be automated, which eliminates waste and helps your entire organization move faster without fear of breaking something.

Figure 2. The Second Way is a feedback loop that drives continuous improvement

The Third Way

As your organization leverages the apparatus created in _The First _and _Second Way_s, The Third Way revolves around the idea of enabling rapid experimentation for an even more in-depth understanding of customer needs. Since the apparatus is all-around promoting a fast flow, prevention of issues, and recovery from problems, organizations can take more chances in The Third Way and can conduct bold experiments right in production.

The cultural impacts of these concepts are apparent in several practices. Teams able to begin their journey on The Third Way regularly allocate time for improving daily work. They may also intentionally introduce faults into the system to test their ability to respond and recover to improve the system and their skills. Organizations will also reward bold experimentation for fostering innovation, nurturing learning, and embedding courageous behaviour into their cultural DNA.

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