Agile. DevOps. Scrum. All these words are quite popular these days among IT enterprises, especially development and operation teams, who have to work in collaboration with each other. This ‘No profile- driven’ methodology is finding a lot of success and adoption, especially when most of the enthusiasm and thought leadership appears to come from the Operations side. It’s because they are the client-facing people, always in touch with end-users. But why and how this is important for developers?

Benjamin Wootton has written a short, but striking, article about why DevOps matters to developers.

Developers can too contribute a lot just like the operation teams, especially by opening up the communication paths and adopting Operations-like skills and mindsets. This will lead to communicating, knowledge sharing, and collaborating, increasing the quality of the systems that they build and operate. But what else DevOps adoption can do, or simply, why they heck it matters? Here’s the answer:

First, it increases the focus on production. When developers will extend their role only from delivering the code to deliver a product or a feature or a system that is in production and that people are reliably using and gaining business benefit from. It’s because DevOps oriented development teams have a focus on value and their user base – basically the operational focus on production and delivery which leads to much more net value being created for the business.

Next, QA among the developer teams can ensure better code performance by having a stringent focus on code issues and those related to the general site reliability. Plus, by being more operationally aware of the production context that our code lives within, developers can also design and build better software. And this is possible only by increasing communication with operations teams will we developers learn about these concerns and incorporate them into our designs and every day coding decisions.

Most importantly, if we talk about the real benefit for developers (yes!), it improves their career prospects, helps develop own platforms and infrastructure, and manage modern infrastructure. In most of the software teams and hiring decisions, agile and DevOps is a desired thing. So, if you have knowledge, skills and experience to reliably deliver a working production system over the long haul, this is going to be a big advantage for you.

Be sure to catch the entire article at Wootton’s blog.