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DevOps is an evolution of XP.
Back in 2004, at an online jobs startup, we had one team for requirements, design, architecture, dev, test and part of IT ops. We automated all our unit tests, integration tests and deployment tests to our test environment. We had a one-button deployment to test process that we ran multiple times a day. We used feature flags to deploy features to production that weren’t ready for business deployment. Our Dev team made performance improvements, deployed their work to production and fixed their own production bugs. We called this XP and Agile because that’s what it was called in 2004.
There are things that the DevOps movement calls for today that we weren’t doing in 2004. Our teams were cross-functional, but they didn’t include UI design or server management. We ran virtual servers on Rackspace hosted machines, but we weren't on the cloud because there was no cloud infrastructure in 2004. AWS launched in 2006. We configured our dev and test servers with scripts and monitored them automatically, but our dev team didn’t configure and manage production servers. Our Dev team didn’t deploy to production every day because the server team thought deployments were very risky, and no one understood the benefits. And we used projects to deliver product changes rather than a continuous stream of features because that was how the business wanted to organise its work.
