Kohsuke Kawaguchi is Chief Technology Officer of CloudBees, and the originator of the Jenkins automation platform upon which so many development and operations teams both depend. As Kawaguchi told The New Stack, he’s witnessed numerous examples of organic evolutions of automation, where two teams automated their own processes to the extent that the interactions between them get automated as well. In such a circumstance, he acknowledges, the transactions that take place may only exist today because they existed in the past — because that’s the way these jobs were designed to work, back before they became automated.

“I do also wonder, is that an optimal way to do things?” asked Kawaguchi. “If you did the thinking from scratch, do you do automation along the previous organizational boundaries?”