In today’s world of open-source software, developers are considered to be the “new kingmakers” of information technology — the brains and the imagination that drives software and application program interfaces, and thus organizations. It can be a phenomenon not well understood by business leaders, however, where developers influence many technology infrastructure decisions, but they are not the ones who necessarily make financial decisions in an organization.

“If you want to run an agile business, a digital business today, you can’t do it without happy developers and a good developer experience, so you have to cater to their needs and their biases,” said Val Bercovici (pictured), co-founder of Peritus.ai Inc.

Bercovici spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the Cisco DevNet Create event in San Francisco, California.

In addition to discussing the role of developers within organizations today, they also discussed current DevOps challenges. (* Disclosure below.)

Seeking more structured DevOps

The main challenge of implementing DevOps is one of culture, according to Bercovici. Specifically, it’s Conway’s law, which says that any software output is a function of the organizational structure that created it. The organizational structure is rarely in place to incentivize entire teams to collaborate throughout a full integration/continuous deployment pipeline process, he added.

While there may be incentive structures and organizational structures in place for people to develop code, unit test it and integration test it, more often than not, Bercovici sees isolated or fenced-off operations teams that take that code and try to make it “something real.” They might call themselves site recovery engineers, but they’re not integrated enough into the development process, he explained.

“Where there’s a legitimate business reason for more agile businesses, there should be a much more formal DevOps structure as opposed to [a] skunkworks DevOps structure,” Bercovici stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cisco DevNet Create 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Cisco DevNet Create. Neither Cisco DevNet nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE