It remains a fact that most enterprises do not retain their own software developers.  Indeed, there are major institutions today whose IT operations leaders have never actually met the people who wrote their software, or know whether they’re still alive.  And throughout the Southeast Asian region, software developers are often hired on contract, produce their work in one lump sum, and wait to get paid once it’s installed, tested, and approved.  There, the benefactors don’t expect to need that software to be replaced for at least another five years, in some cases as high as 15 years.

Some IT ops professionals perceive the idea of software development automation with daily release cycles as foreign a concept to their own way of work as, say, replacing their manufacturing lines with molecular manipulators that could produce fully functional bulldozers out of compressed peat moss.  DevOps may be an indicator of the directions that institutions and enterprises must evolve to stay relevant in the long term, but how many iterations of change will they require before they can declare themselves, technically speaking, “there?”