DevOps: far more than a technical toolset
In SAFe, DevOps is defined as a mindset, culture, and set of technical practices that enable close collaboration between Development and Operations, in order to continuously deliver value to customers. It is not simply a matter of automation tools, but a deep cultural transformation of traditional organizational silos.
Historically, Development and Operations teams often had conflicting goals: the former sought to rapidly deliver new features, the latter to maintain the stability of production systems. DevOps seeks to resolve this tension by aligning both camps around a shared goal: fast, reliable delivery of value.
The Continuous Delivery Pipeline in four steps
SAFe structures the continuous delivery of value around a Continuous Delivery Pipeline, made up of four aspects. Continuous Exploration involves exploring the market and user needs to define a Vision, a Roadmap, and Features. Continuous Integration takes these Features, develops them, and validates them in a staging environment.
Continuous Deployment then deploys the validated features into production, where they are monitored and verified. Finally, Release on Demand makes these features available to end users, on a schedule decoupled from the technical deployment itself, thanks to techniques such as feature toggles.
CALMR: the five dimensions of a successful DevOps transformation
SAFe proposes the CALMR approach to structure a DevOps transformation holistically. Culture refers to the collaborative mindset to establish between Dev and Ops. Automation concerns automating repetitive, error-prone tasks. Lean flow aims to reduce queues and batch sizes to speed up delivery.
Measurement involves instrumenting the pipeline to obtain reliable data on its performance. Recovery, finally, refers to the ability to design systems that allow for fast recovery in the event of an incident, rather than trying to eliminate all risk of failure, which is illusory in complex systems.
Why this culture is essential at the scale of an ART
When multiple teams contribute to the same solution, the absence of a solid DevOps culture quickly translates into bottlenecks at integration and deployment time: each team delivers its work separately, but the final assembly becomes a major friction point, often causing significant delays.
A mature DevOps culture, combined with a well-designed continuous delivery pipeline, allows the ART to deliver value smoothly and predictably, drastically reducing the time between an idea and its actual availability to users.
Getting SAFe DevOps Practitioner certified
The SAFe® 6 DevOps Practitioner (SDP) certification validates your understanding of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline, the CALMR approach, and the practices for measuring and improving the value stream within an ART. It is aimed at team members, technical leads, and operations staff engaged in a DevOps initiative.
It's a certification particularly well suited for professionals wanting to lead or support the improvement of an organization's technical pipeline as it adopts SAFe, complementing a more generalist certification such as SAFe Practitioner or SAFe Scrum Master.