The Inverse DevOps Principle
The Inverse DevOps Principle suggests that DevOps effectiveness declines as it becomes a label, a role or increasingly branded. The healthiest DevOps cultures don’t advertise themselves—they simply deliver.
The Inverse DevOps Principle
DevOps maturity is inversely correlated with the need to justify or brand DevOps initiatives.
Over the years, I’ve worked with companies that “did DevOps” and companies that talked about DevOps. The difference was obvious almost immediately.
In the organizations where DevOps worked well, the word itself barely came up. Teams owned their services end to end and no one felt the need to label something as "DevOps".
By contrast, in companies where DevOps was struggling, the term was everywhere. There were DevOps roadmaps, DevOps teams and DevOps engineers. For product owners, DevOps became a synonym for Ops and for managers just another position that builds cicd-pipelines. But most of all it was used to signal modernity without changing incentives, structures, or habits.
The more an organization talks about DevOps, the less likely it is practicing it well.
This pattern repeated often enough that it became hard to ignore. The more DevOps needed to be named, defended, or explained, the less it was actually present in practice. That observation led me to what I now think of as the Inverse DevOps Principle.