What do I think about BizDevOps?

Yesterday I was asked my thoughts on BizDevOps. Here are my three thoughts on the topic.

Yesterday, after my presentation at Scrum Day Europe, I was asked my view on BizDevOps.

First, let me try to define BizDevOps for the unfamiliar: Whereas DevOps aims to align the operations of development and operations, BizDevOps aims to align the operations of business, development and operations.

So what do I think about it?

I have three answers:

  1. If including “Biz” in your nomenclature helps you in some way, by including business decision makers in the software development process, for example, then by all means, do it! I’m a big advocate of doing what works. If this works for you, don’t let anyone tell you to change.
  2. Having said that, the term feels superfluous to me. The entire reason we do Dev and Ops is to serve a business need. In this sense, tacking on the “Biz” prefix to “DevOps” seems analogous to tacking on “Cust” (as in cusotmer) to the beginning of “Business”, just so we don’t forget that the business exists to serve customers. CustBizDevOps! But why stop there? Customers care about their children, right? ChilCustBizDevOps FTW!
  3. And finally, in particular for my audience yesterday who were (presumably) using Scrum, Scrum largely fills the role of the “Biz” in “BizDevOps” anyway. So if you’re using Scrum with DevOps, you’re probably already explicitly doing BizDevOps, just by another name.
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