Preface

Imagine it's 2 AM, and your phone is buzzing frantically. It's your security team, and they're not calling with good news. Your latest release was compromised because a simple security check was skipped to meet an aggressive deployment deadline. Now your company's name is all over the news. What if there was a better way? This scenario isn't just hypothetical — it's the harsh reality many organizations face today.

Software engineering has always been built on a set of ideas and philosophies. Each era of technological advancement stands on the shoulders of what came before it, with new innovations that refine and expand upon past frameworks to meet new challenges.

One of the first major frameworks for software development was the Waterfall model (1970), a sequential approach where each phase—requirements, design, implementation, testing, and deployment—had to be completed before moving to the next. Ten years later, the Spiral model (1980) introduced an iterative cycle with continuous risk assessment, allowing for gradual refinement.

Around the same time, companies began to realize the importance of aligning operations with business goals. One of the first frameworks to address this was ITIL (1980s), which focused on IT service management (ITSM) and operations and their alignment with wider business needs and not just technical requirements. This framework was followed by the V-Model (1986), which proposed parallel testing at each development stage to prevent defects from propagating.

Finally, Agile (2001) redefined software development with its flexible and iterative approach, emphasized collaboration, and rapid adaptation to change. With different implementations like Scrum, Kanban, and Lean, Agile has become the dominant software development methodology. Development teams started delivering software faster and more frequently. A productive team could deliver a new feature in a matter of hours or days, rather than weeks or months. Operations teams, however, struggled to keep up with the pace of change. Agility, unfortunately, didn't extend to the operations side of the house, and the gap between development and operations teams widened. Both teams had different goals (change vs. stability) and different ways of working (Agile vs. ITIL). The fast pace of development led to a proliferation of tools and scripts in the guise of automation from both stakeholders. These tools were often not the right fit for the other team, which made it difficult to maintain and scale the infrastructure, in addition to the fact that the cultural problems between the two teams were not addressed. A silo was created between development and operations teams.