Theresa Lanowitz, founder of Voke, Inc. an independent technology analyst firm, said to only talk about breaking down the silos between the development and operations teams would be myopic; the conversation, she added, needs to include the architects, the QA team and business analysts.

“Dev Ops is a faddish term. We’ve spoken for the past 10 years about breaking down the silos,” Lanowitz said, adding that software developers need to look at transforming the whole lifecycle and evaluate the entire supply chain in order to continue evolving the application lifecycle management process. 

Conversations and connectivity between teams, with a focus on their individual skills is an important part of the process, she said.

Developers will not become operations professionals and operations will not become developers, Lanowitz said, they will still each have their own specialized skills, but they should be able to connect with one another about software development projects. It is part of the idea in ALM that traditional IT is merging with embedded systems, something we’ll be featuring in our story about Voke’s recent ALM survey.

Are you breaking the silos? Are you a business analyst or software architect working with developers? Email vreitano@bzmedia.com; we’d love to hear your side of the story.