Nothing is immune to change, including software delivery practices. As DevOps continues to mature, for example, and become more deeply ingrained in the enterprise, new revelations are discovered and expanded upon throughout the industry. However, three basic tenets will always remain at the core of DevOps: people, processes and tools. While each of the three is equally important to a DevOps transformation, we found this week’s top news dives specifically into the DevOps toolchain.  Continue reading to learn which configuration management tools to choose and how to use the toolchain to scale successfully. Even with all the hype around DevOps, we still haven’t forgotten about another popular method – Agile (or, is it a mindset?).

Continue reading for more on the latest DevOps news and trends, and, as always, stay tuned to all the news coming from @ElectricCloud on DevOps and Continuous Delivery throughout the week.

1) What is DevOps? Gene Kim Explains

Gene Kim is an author of the popular DevOps Novel, The Phoenix Project, and the upcoming DevOps Handbook, currently scheduled for release in October. He was formerly the founder and CTO of Tripwire, but these days you can find him writing books, organizing the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and working on research and other projects as a co-founder of IT Revolution.

2) The Secret to Successful Scaling: Use the DevOps Toolchain to Become a Well-Oiled Machine

One of the most exciting challenges young companies face is the prospect of scaling up. Successful growth is not just about gaining traction, but about implementing a smart business model that allows you to expand your customer base without increasing overhead at the same rate. Ideally, a scalable strategy will enable exponential revenue growth alongside more incremental cost increases.

3) An Agile Dilemma: Mindset or Method?

There’s an intriguing dialogue happening in the world of Agile software development that may be relevant for anyone interested in how business works in a rapidly changing world. For those readers who are not familiar with Agile, this innovative approach to creating software emerged out of a February 2001 gathering of seventeen software developers in Snowbird, Utah. Among them were Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the coauthors of what has come to be known as Scrum, and Ward Cunningham, the originator of the wiki, which became popularized with the explosive growth of Wikipedia.

4) DevOps Experts Unite on Video Podcast Series

To remain competitive in today’s software-driven economy, organizations of all sizes are investing in DevOps to become better at releasing software. Although the ROI is evident in the IT and business performance of organizations that have successfully implemented DevOps practices, the journey still can be challenging.

5) Select The Best Configuration Management Tools For Your Company

Choosing the best configuration management tools is not easy. There is a raft of options on the market, ranging from simple command-line interface scripting tools to full-blown packaging and provisioning systems, as well as application release automation and orchestration tools. The key to selecting the best configuration management tools is to focus on what the organization needs are and analyze which of the many offerings will suit your enterprise.

6) A Transformation Journey to Modernized IT | @BigDataExpo #Cloud #BigData #DigitalTransformation

Improving end-user experiences and leveraging big data analytics helps Aimia head off digital disruption and improve core operations and processes. The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital business transformation case study examines how loyalty management innovator Aimia is modernizing, consolidating, and standardizing its global IT infrastructure.

7) New IT Salary Research Shows Most DevOps Practitioners Earn $100K or More

Puppet recently released its 2016 DevOps Salary Report which indicates that most DevOps practitioners in the United States earn $100,000 or more in annual salary. The annual report also found that 43 percent of IT managers earn $150,000 or more, up from 26 percent last year. The salary report is based on data gathered from more than 4,600 respondents to the survey.

8) Small Things Matter: What Developers Should Really Care About

Hey boy, are you doing microservices? Sure you are. Everybody does. Have you moved to 4-tier architecture already? Are your applications cloud-native? Have you container-dockerized yourself? All of it? Then, I bet you also have strong DevOps culture. Of course, none of these could be achieved without Management 3000.0 and Modern Agile. Oh boy, you’re so awesome! But wait, wait. We’re not done yet. You’re using Marathon or Kubernetes, right? And Big Data, you have to do Big Data! What about your APIs? Are they RESTful enough?

9) Testing In Production Comes Out Of The Shadows

For enterprise testing organizations, the world of software development is somewhat similar to the world of legalized marijuana. There’s a saying in the legal pot world: “Out of the shadows and into the light.” This is used to describe the way users of illegal weed are now able to come out of hiding and talk about their usage in public without fear of reprisal.

10) Agile in Dispersed or Distributed Teams

Cross-cultural team building enables collaboration and teamwork in dispersed or distributed agile teams. You need to invest to get the best out of a dispersed team argues Nienke Alma, a people oriented Agile enthusiast working as a Scrum master and agile coach. Several more people wrote about what is needed to make agile work with dispersed or distributed teams.

DevOps has become one of the most widely adopted buzzwords in modern software delivery — but widespread adoption does not mean correct adoption. Many organizations brand themselves as “doing DevOps” while continuing practices that directly contradict the core principles of the movement. The result is a surface-level transformation that delivers few of the promised benefits: faster deployments, fewer incidents, and tighter collaboration between development and operations.

This article, originally inspired by a piece published on DZone DevOps, explores three of the clearest warning signs that your DevOps program is off track — and what genuine DevOps practice looks like instead.

Sign 1: Dev and Ops Still Work in Separate Silos

The most fundamental goal of DevOps is to break down the wall between development teams (who want to ship change quickly) and operations teams (who want to maintain stability). If your developers hand off a build to a separate ops team that deploys it without any shared ownership, responsibility, or tooling, you have renamed a waterfall handoff — you have not eliminated it.

Real DevOps looks like shared on-call rotations, joint post-incident reviews, developers with access to production observability dashboards, and operations engineers contributing to CI/CD pipeline design. The org chart may still show distinct roles, but the workflow should be deeply integrated.

What to look for

• Tickets thrown “over the wall” from Dev to Ops for every deployment
• Developers who have never logged into a production monitoring tool
• Operations engineers who learn about a new feature on release day
• Separate backlogs with no shared prioritization

Sign 2: Manual Processes Are Still Gating Releases

If a human being must manually approve, package, or deploy every release, your pipeline is not a DevOps pipeline — it is a traditional release process with a CI server bolted to the front. Automation is not a “nice to have” in DevOps; it is the mechanism that makes continuous delivery possible at scale.

This does not mean removing all human judgment from the process. Change advisory board (CAB) reviews and manual approval gates have legitimate uses, especially for high-risk changes. The problem arises when manual steps are the default for routine, low-risk deployments that could safely be automated.

What to look for

• Deployments that require a specific person to be available and on-keyboard
• No automated test suite running on every commit
• Configuration changes made by logging into servers directly rather than through infrastructure-as-code tooling
• Release schedules measured in weeks or months rather than days or hours

Sign 3: There Is No Feedback Loop From Production

DevOps is not just about shipping software faster — it is about learning faster. Continuous feedback from production systems back into the development cycle is what allows teams to catch problems early, understand user behavior, and make informed architectural decisions. Without it, teams are flying blind regardless of how fast they deploy.

A healthy feedback loop includes application performance monitoring (APM), centralized log aggregation, alerting that reaches the team who wrote the code, and regular review of production metrics during planning sessions. Developers should know within minutes when something they shipped is causing errors in production.

What to look for

• Developers who only hear about production issues from customer support tickets
• No dashboards or runbooks shared between Dev and Ops
• Post-mortems that never result in process changes
• No defined SLOs (Service Level Objectives) or error budgets

How to Course-Correct

Recognizing these patterns is the first and most important step. DevOps transformation does not happen by purchasing a tool or renaming a team. It requires deliberate cultural change, executive sponsorship, and incremental process improvement measured against real outcomes: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate.

Start with the constraint that is causing the most pain. If deployments are slow because of manual steps, automate one pipeline stage at a time. If incidents are frequent because Dev and Ops don’t communicate, start a shared Slack channel and joint incident review. Small, visible wins build the trust and momentum needed for deeper transformation.

This article expands on themes from the original DZone piece: 3 Signs You’re Doing DevOps Wrong — DZone DevOps.