In 2024, more business leaders will engage with DevOps processes, developers will begin to see a shift from measuring productivity to enabling creativity, and DevOps AI will take the next step from passive analysis to active failure prevention and beyond.

DevOps extends further into the business

The wonderful Jennifer Riggins, a tech storyteller and journalist who has been exploring themes of people, process, and technology in 2023, published a piece predicting what DevOps teams need to know in 2024.

My contribution to this article was the idea that engineering and business leaders from across the organization will become even closer, leading to the introduction of DevOps culture into other parts of the business including sales, operations, and the C-Suite.

“DevOps culture will take even more cross-team collaboration in 2024,” said Anna Daugherty, Director of Product Marketing at Opsera. “Now, DevOps is reaching further into the business outside of developer teams. Business leaders are becoming more exposed to the needs and benefits of these processes.”

Source: https://leaddev.com/process/what-devops-teams-need-know-2024

In order for this setup to work, cross-functional collaboration requires devs, engineering, and business leaders to adopt a common language, all based on data that shows the impact that DevOps can have on company outcomes. 

The goal of this collaboration is to show how DevOps practices positively impact the business, and for business leaders to understand the solutions, security, cost-savings, and innovation that is enabled by these practices.

Transition from developer productivity to creativity

When I saw this post by Gartner VP Analyst Manju Bhat in my LinkedIn feed, it felt like a turning point. 

2023 was about reductions in force, cost-savings, brutal layoffs, and contraction of the power of developers in nearly every industry. One of the major talking points we saw was a focus on “developer productivity” in a way we hadn’t paid attention to when investment dollars and valuations were plentiful. Some developers were even being measured by lines of code, not by the value  they were driving for the business.

I believe that developers should be enabled to be productive, and that it’s important to understand where their blockers are. Mechanisms like DORA can help showcase how teams perform, where to look for improvements and opportunities, and how to remove these blockers.

If we shift the focus from developer productivity to developer creativity, we’ll be unlocking the true power of our engineering workforce. They’re problem solvers, their innovators, they create powerful solutions from a few lines of code. Let’s help them get there without feeling the weight of bogus productivity metrics breathing down their necks. 

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7142092735657750528-zozb 

Take DevOps AI to the next level

AI will evolve from analyzing and automating DevOps tasks to solving problems, suggesting and implementing new processes, and even helping developers tap into even more of their creativity.

Opsera’s goal for Hummingbird AI is to transform how organizations use the data across all of their teams, tools, environments, and applications to optimize pipelines, fix problems fast, and eventually predict failures and vulnerabilities before code is even committed. 

Source: https://www.opsera.io/hummingbird-ai

Let’s talk about your 2024 DevOps culture, processes, and technology needs, and how to enable your developers to take advantage of the power of next-gen DevOps AI.