One of the hardest daily tasks developers, QA, ScrumMasters, and product owners encounter is effective communication with others. Sound implausible? According to many articles, research, and personal observations, the main cause of project failure is not technology or hardware, but inefficient communication stemming from lack of effective communication between team members, incomplete business analysis, imprecise requirements, and vaguely formulated business objectives.

Agile's core principles may have been originally intended at the software development, but the concept of DevOps has shown that agile's benefits can be experienced by a much larger audience. Collaboration between these two departments benefits just as much as anyone.

Below are some observations I've made and I'd like to solicit the communities feedback on the conclusion I've drawn from it.

When looking at industrializing software development by creating a fully integrated and automated pipeline through which changes flow from check-in, through integration, build, testing, packaging and deployment; there are 2 paths one can follow:

1) Buy and implement a single vendor solution that covers the whole pipeline from check-in to deployment, the main drawback with this option being that most of the tools that make up the pipeline will do an OK job, not great, not the best in the industry but they will get the job done. Secondly there is the tie-in to a single vendor which is often perceived as a thorny issue because of the usual what-ifs and the constraints on customization of processes, tools etc.

“Expectations from IT just keep increasing every single day “– this is a point of view echoed by several CIOs across the organizations all over the globe. Newer developments in IT like Social Networking, Green IT, Virtualization, and Business analytics are changing the way businesses are run.