DOF cheat sheet

DevOps unites development and operations to deliver value faster and more reliably.

CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing) is the standard shorthand for DevOps scope.

The Three Ways describe flow, feedback and continual learning.

A DevOps title or platform team can exist, but a new silo is not a substitute for shared delivery outcomes.

Agile and DevOps are complementary: Agile focuses on development, DevOps spans the whole value stream.

Generative (Westrum) cultures share information and welcome bad news; they deliver better outcomes than pathological or bureaucratic ones.

Psychological safety enables people to surface problems early.

Blameless postmortems target systemic causes, not individuals.

Automation serves speed, repeatability and risk reduction - it is an enabler, not the definition of DevOps.

Version control underpins everything: code, configuration, infrastructure and documentation.

Infrastructure as Code makes environments reproducible, reviewable and disposable.

Automate toil (repetitive, manual, low-value work) rather than automating indiscriminately.

Loosely coupled architectures and balanced automated testing shorten feedback and reduce deployment risk.

Tool adoption without process simplification produces faster failure, not faster delivery.

Distinguish the legacy four-key model from current DORA’s five-metric guidance and stated groupings.

Throughput and stability metrics improve together in high-performing organisations.

Goodhart's Law warns that metrics used as targets are gamed; use them for learning.

SLIs measure, SLOs set targets, and error budgets balance change risk against reliability.

Averages hide outliers - use percentiles and distributions.

Avoid vanity metrics and any metric used to rank individuals.

Feedback must flow continuously from production, monitoring and customers back to development.

Postmortems are blameless and produce owned, tracked actions.

Retrospectives only count when they change behaviour; actions need owners and dates.

Sharing is deliberate: communities of practice, dojos, open dashboards, documentation in version control.

Continual experimentation (PDCA, kaizen, hypothesis-driven change) drives long-term improvement.