Process: DevOps

As respect for design as a competitive advantage grows, companies are tackling the challenge of integrating design practices into enterprises and digital businesses. DesignOps is an emerging strategy for addressing this challenge. The UX community is now exploring best practices for operationalizing and scaling in-house design.

DevOps is an IT methodology for designing and operating complex IT systems and organizations. DevOps addresses the question of how to build and run sociotechnical systems that can scale without becoming brittle. Understanding the DevOps approach can help the UX community think more broadly and systematically about what it means to scale design.

DevOps and DesignOps are both responses to the same underlying phenomenon. We are living through a transition from an industrial economy whose focus was physical products to a post-industrial economy that centers on digital services. This post-industrial business economy isn’t just about making digital products instead of physical ones. It’s about integrating the physical and digital realms with one another—infusing each with the other. Read More

This month in Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses whether UX designers still receive frequent requests for agile, or whether they’re now receiving more requests for spiral, Lean, or DevOps. Our panelists also explore whether the rise of these other methodologies has affected the UX designs they create.

Our experts first discuss what agile means and confront the reality that different organizations often implement agile in different ways. The panel then considers the impact of whether an organization implements agile across the entire company or only on individual teams. The root motivation for requesting agile, spiral, Lean, or DevOps is also important: why is the organization asking for a particular methodology? Is it really the methodology that the company wants or certain attributes of the resulting designs. Or maybe they request the methodology with the expectation that it would reduce the time or financial investment that would be necessary. Read More