Design is a critical software project element that often goes unnoticed by those writing code. After all, coders and implementers tend to take the design process for granted and leave the look and feel of applications to the designers. In the days of waterfall based development, design was one of the first steps in the development sequence of creating a new application. However, with Agile and DevOps development practices, design became disconnected from the overall process.

“If you look at the full spectrum of AppDev, it becomes obvious that there are many elements that should be part of DevOps. Take, for example, cyber – today, there is a movement to integrate cyber into the DevOps pipeline, which the industry has started to call DevSecOps,” said Mark Troester, VP of strategy at Progress, a software company offering tools for developers and IT. “To make design a part of the iterative process of DevOps, teams need to think about including designers during the complete development process, something along the lines of how cyber has become part of the iterative process. In other words, teams should be embracing the concept of DesignOps,” Troester said.

To understand the challenges this creates for those looking to include design as part of the DevOps process, one only needs to look at how design, specifically user experience/customer experience (UX/CX) design, was done in the past. Designers would use tools such as InVision Studio, Axure, Proto.IO, Adobe XD, or one of the many other tools available, to prototype the look and feel of an application, or, more specifically, the end-user experience. The term DesignOps was coined to encapsulate the processes around design. However, DesignOps solely focused on the process of design, such as design workflows, design tools, design governance, team management, budgets and so on.

The ultimate goal of DesignOps was design creation; that design was then passed on to those who would write the code and develop the logic to bring that design to fruition in the form of an application. DesignOps worked rather well when an organization was adhering to waterfall development methodologies, where each step was clearly defined and the goal was to deliver a complete, finalized application to those requesting it.

“Larger organizations were able to field large design teams and could afford to implement a complete design system. When you have 50 or more designers, a complete design system becomes critical to manage design,” said Troester. “However, as AppDev has evolved into a more agile process, especially under DevOps, the disconnect between design and development became a significant problem.”

What Troester is alluding to is the reiterative development cycle used by DevOps teams, where applications are delivered in pieces and then further modified based on user feedback or business operational changes. Businesses today are embracing agile concepts, so they can react much faster to changing market conditions. This, in turn, means modifying applications as quickly as possible to maintain a competitive advantage. Currently, design remains somewhat siloed, and can become a bottleneck for implementing changes if the UX/CX must be modified to address those needed changes.

“With the rise of DevOps, teams need to start thinking of reiterative processes, where DesignOps integrates with the DevOps team, so there is collaboration between the designers and the developers, allowing design changes to happen quickly,” Troester said. “Yet, there are still remaining challenges – some created by the COVID-19 crisis – where designers and developers may not even be in the same building, much less the same time zone,” he said.

To Troester’s point, the COVID-19 crisis has forced businesses to evolve in ways that were once thought impossible. Developers, designers and even operations teams and individuals may no longer be sharing office space, and might be distributed across multiple locations. That complication will drive the need for better collaboration tools that bring design into the DevOps cycle.

“DevOps teams, as well as DesignOps teams, should be looking into technologies that can bridge the designer/developer divide. It will be critical in the near future to facilitate collaboration between design and development,” Troester said. “Perhaps, the answer lies with building some type of bi-directional API into design systems, which can play a key role in the implementation and support of design-first experiences,” he added.

Existing solutions to the current divide seem to be few and far between. But, that does not mean DesignOps and DevOps teams should not be currently looking for a solution to what will become a major problem as DevOps accelerates in the enterprise.

A new report from venture capital and M&A data provider PitchBook has explored how DevOps tools will continue to blossom in developer and enterprise contexts – as well as how Covid-19 has quickened digital transformation.

The company’s latest quarterly emerging tech report on cloud tech focused on an overview of technologies related to DevOps as it sees opportunities in ‘broader organisational efforts to make complex systems, workflows and other processes more cohesive, responsive, and manageable.’

With this in mind, PitchBook’s area of analysis for DevOps includes spaces such as enterprise communication and collaboration tools, low-code and robotic process automation (RPA).

Overall, the pandemic is increasing the pace of CI/CD adoption as more companies work to move application development processes from behind the firewall and into cloud environments. In terms of how this looks practically, the report sees a wider increase.

“We expect this to drive more investment and innovation in collaboration and communication ecosystems that can facilitate the distributed enterprise,” the report noted. “This trend will also encourage a quicker shift to cloud computing as businesses seek to minimise location-based manual operations.”

As companies shift to a changing style of work, DevOps can also help with this. “Organisations are evolving into continuous creators of digital IP,” the report noted. “To be successful, they must find ways to streamline and prioritise product creation and reduce administrative bottlenecks.

“DevOps has the potential to help organisations realise these goals, while making it easier to manage the complexity and fast-paced nature of today’s IT landscape.”

The report focused on two primary funding announcements in the past quarter; CircleCI, who raised $100 million in a series E round in April, and developer collaboration platform Postman, who secured $150m in June. Collaboration technology more widely also saw an uptick, including deals for Loom, , and Miro.

The latter two are key to an emerging trend which the report notes as ‘DesignOps’. Improvements in the software development supply chain, PitchBook said, are putting pressure on companies to enhance design practices and facilitate better collaboration.

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Patrick Hubbard, of SolarWinds, explored whether DevOps and APM would see an uptick from the ‘next normal.’

“IT tends to hunker down during uncertain times and run as little as possible – but I’d argue the value [DevOps] brings to IT teams of many different sizes can be key to enterprise transformation ambitions – digital, survival, or otherwise,” he wrote.

“It remains unclear what the ‘next normal’ entails, but the fundamentals of great service delivery remain the same,” Hubbard added. “The DevOps focus on flexibility and continuous process improvement to break transformation logjams comes in handy when the future of technology is full of new possibility.”