Why DevOps is Like Football

When it’s done right, DevOps is an impressive feat. You have groups of professionals all melding together as one large team working toward a common goal. The groups–and the individuals themselves–perform their roles and hand off tasks to each other at just the right times. They follow pre-designed plans, but they constantly tweak those plans, in real time, to deal with variables that threaten to undermine the whole mission.

This is DevOps in action. But take a closer look at some of the descriptors above and ask yourself if it sounds like something else that’s starting to creep into a lot of conversations this time of year. If you’re a sports fan like me, this sounds just like football.

Let’s face it, football parallels have been attached to all kinds of institutions and practices–everything from the military to business to marriage. The emphasis on discipline, teamwork and execution can apply to most initiatives in everyday life.

But I’d argue that football’s very structure aligns especially well with what we do in DevOps.

In football, the goal is to move the ball from the line of scrimmage to the end zone. In DevOps, we have our own starting and ending points. Think of our line of scrimmage as the point where features get added to the application and our end zone as the point where an application is successfully delivered to a customer. Football has its individual units (offense, defense, special teams) and we have ours (development, quality assurance and operations).

In football, the offense players have different specialized skills and all work together to move the ball forward to reach the end zone. The players start with a set of instructions (plays), which they all understand. This is like automation in a DevOps environment. A DevOps team execute its own plays, collaborating and improvising as needed to achieve their shared goal.

Picture what this would look like in a pro football game:

• The quarterback passes the ball: Think of a software developer handing off the application to a test engineer.
• Linemen block for the quarterback: This is like quality assurance continuously protecting the application from bugs that threaten to sack the whole project.
• A receiver runs a route and catches the ball: This is similar to an operations engineer preparing a server and receiving the application.
• A running back runs the ball into the end zone for a touchdown: The application is deployed. Goal!

The team has worked together and achieved the goal–in this case, a touchdown. They will be able to repeat this success time and time again because they have repeatable plays and they collaborate.

Without a DevOps approach imagine what a football game would look like:

No Automation: The team has no plays. Nobody on the field has any idea what his assignment is on each snap, so players basically do their own thing. All the speedy, skilled players yell “Throw it to me!” This kind of freelancing might work for youngsters playing pick-up football, but it won’t work in a more advanced game.

No Collaboration: The positions don’t work together. Even if team members have plays and know them, if the linemen don’t block as a unit, a play will fail. If a running back zigs when linemen are opening up a hole for him to zag, the defense will stop him.

No Shared Objectives: If everybody knows the play but they’re only concerned about executing their parts of it, the offense won’t get far. Imagine:

• The quarterback being concerned with just getting the ball in the air, not where it goes or even if it is caught. The receiver can worry about that. End result: Lots of failed passes–and probably a few interceptions.
• Linemen will block, but they’re not worried about who to block or when. End result: Lots of quarterback sacks.
• Receivers will run routes, but they’ll choose where they want to go. They might run beautifully, and even get open periodically. But if the quarterback doesn’t know where the receivers are, the team won’t complete many passes.

Without a DevOps approach, the chances of getting a ball to the end zone would be very low. And when it did get there, the process would be messy and unrepeatable.

When football is done right, teams defend well, score a lot of points and rack up victories. When DevOps is done right, organizations deliver high-quality software to customers in a rapid, repeatable and reliable way. DevOps, like football, codifies a winning process that serves a vast group of stakeholders both inside and outside of the organizations playing the game.

— Brian Dawson