Collaboration is the key toDevOps successAs one of the world’s largest business software companies, SAP has more than 20,000 developers
on teams scattered across the globe. In today’s DevOps environment, SAP leadership knows that thesuccess of this enormous operation hinges on easy collaboration among far-flung teams and individual
developers. That has meant finding an effective way for everyone to communicate and work together,while at the same time driving greater efficiency and creativity.
Dominik Tornow, SAP’s director of engineering with theLabs, Processes, and Tools group, believes that centralized
processes don’t lead to innovation. Developers, architects,
and product managers all want to deliver exceptional andcontinuous functionality. To do this, they need to be able tocollaborate on their own terms.

The question is, “how?”
Because DevOps has been so widely accepted, companies
and organizations are looking for ways to optimize
efficiency from this software development methodology.
A central aim is to increase efficiency across the entire
systems development lifecycle. And, as research shows,
DevOps continues growing rapidly.

DevOps efficiency is about people collaborating,
not technology
In a recent global study of IT leaders across 10 majorindustries, TechTarget reported a 17% year-over-year
growth in organizations that have adopted DevOps, leaving
only 30% with no DevOps initiatives as of yet. Respondents
ranked “eliminating process bottlenecks to speed apprelease” as the top DevOps challenge, followed closely by“streamlining collaboration among cross-functional DevOpsteams.” While other challenges further down the list relate
to things like software infrastructure, cloud integration, andtools selection, the top two challenges relate to people, nottechnology.1
1 “Informing the path to enterprise DevOps deployments,” TechTarget, October
2018.

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In the 2018 version of another major annual study, thepercentage of respondents working in a “department
called DevOps” grew by a brisk 20%, with the biggest leap
occurring in the last year. This global study additionallyfound that 36% of respondents are currently developingfrom one-quarter to 100% of their applications by DevOps
processes.2
Alanna Brown, who launched the annual study above in 2012,
doubled down on the “people not technology” challengeof boosting DevOps efficiency. She wrote in a recent blog,“The most important themes for us have always been
empowering teams to do their best work, overcoming thecultural divide between development and operations teams
and making IT better for everyone.”3

In fact, the 2018 report itself notes that bestpractices in DevOps start “by improving
collaboration.” The report explains further that,“Cross-team sharing is key to scaling DevOpssuccess. The practices with the most significant
impact across the entire DevOps evolutionary
journey are dependent on sharing. Organizations
that have small pockets of DevOps success, yetnever manage to spread that success further, arestalled and cannot progress to higher levels ofautomation and self-service.”4Open source, DevOps, and collaboration
As DevOps adoption has grown in recent years, open
source has grown right along with it. One projection of
the tremendous interest in open source globally shows
revenues doubling in just three years to $26 billion.5
Collaboration is intertwined with open source, whereby
2 “2018 State of DevOps Report,” Puppet, 2018.
3 “2018 State of DevOps Report: Practical guidance for your DevOps evolution,”
Puppet Blog, September 2018.
4 Ibid(2).
5 “Projected revenue of open source services from 2017 to 2022 (in billions U.S.
dollars),” Statista, 2018.

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software is often developed in a highly collaborative publicprocess. In fact, global organizations across every industry
have been rapidly incorporating open source best practices
into how they build and deploy software.
Many organizations are embracing “innersource”—essentially open source behind a firewall. Innersource isa highly collaborative development methodology using
best practices from large-scale open source projects.
Such projects, like Kubernetes or Microsoft’s Visual Studio
Code, require coordination across literally thousandsof developers and other contributors. Experiences with
innersource have resulted in a list of best practices for
uniting innersource, open source, and DevOps to drive
collaboration and efficiency.
Innersource addresses DevOps challenges by focusing not
only on the collaboration of development and operations,but also on the collaboration of all teams in the software
process.
“Once you embrace [innersource] and see how new teams
come on, you show examples of places where people cancontribute and unlock bottlenecks,” says Jeremy King,
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for
global e-commerce at Walmart. And Jeff Jagoda, Senior
Software Engineer at IBM, says that, “We see innersource
as a way to improve efficiency through code reuse. But
even beyond that, it’s an amazing conduit for learning andexchanging ideas and facilitating innovation within IBM.”Team efforts to boost collaboration in DevOps•	SAP taps into the “wisdom of the crowds”
Some user organizations are frustratingly jogging in placewhen it comes to efforts to overcome DevOps challenges.
At SAP, with a single group within its huge internal
development complex approached management about
leveraging an innovative development platform, GitHub,
to optimize collaboration among team members spreadaround the globe.
Initial successes with GitHub spread by word of mouth.
Soon, developers on other projects were sharing code andideas for creating practical workflows, according to SAP’s

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Tornow. As he reported, the collaborative nature of the platform’s “commits, comments,and issues” became core ingredients for efficiency and innovation. In one case, Tornow’s
group initialized a project containing just a few files on the platform. Within 24 hours, ateam 12 time zones away contacted them, asking if they could contribute.
•	C.H. Robinson replaces siloes with collaboration–and superior software
Facing rapid growth, third-party logistics leader C.H. Robinson needed to ensure its
800-person IT and developer staff worked as a team, despite being spread acrossnumerous offices on three continents. This meant making the team’s workflows as
collaborative and transparent as possible.
The relative autonomy given to developer teams also gave them freedom to choose
their own tools, which caused problems in standardizing code and providing projectvisibility and documentation. Developers had no good way of working on someone else’s
code, even if they could locate it. In an effort to empower local development teams, thecompany had inadvertently created a divided IT organization.
To deal with this situation, C.H. Robinson turned to GitHub. The result to date has been anorganization-wide change “towards openness that surfaces the best solutions,” according
to Tyler Patterson, engineering craft manager. “We’re actually doing things internally toadvertise code. [The tools] let us be an open and collaborative department and team, anddeliver on better products. [...] We’re harnessing the power of other developers across theworld. This is what makes our IT world great.”•	University of Minnesota taps the power of collaboration from 230 departments
and administrative units
The right collaboration platform also proved to be the engine of efficiency and innovation
at the University of Minnesota, where developers are spread across the state in 230
different development departments. As with SAP, a small developer group saw a need
for what it called “a social network for collaborating on code.” After this group adopted
GitHub, the same platform was quickly made available across the entire 60,000-student
university.
According to Peter Walz, a system engineer at the university, the platform has resulted
in expedited code pushes and more pull requests, the use of which has resulted insignificant workflow improvements. “You can easily see what changes are about tomade before they are merged in,” he says. Walz also reported a reduced impact on IT
administration as the platform allowed users to set permissions and self-service on
support. Overall, Walz said, GitHub has “simplified cross-departmental collaboration.”

3We’re harnessing
the power of otherdevelopers acrossthe world. This iswhat makes our IT
world great.

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GitHub is the secret sauce for collaboration
As shown, the one thing these three organizations had incommon when it came to a selecting a platform to drive
collaboration and efficiency to new heights is GitHub. SAP,
C.H. Robinson, and the University of Minnesota join millionsof organizations and developers worldwide currently using
GitHub. Together, these organizations and developers
make up the world’s largest open source community—
sharing code, working securely together, and building
better software, faster. Beyond being home to largest open
source community, GitHub is also easy to use. As stated byAmir Jaballah, global head of continuous delivery platform
at banking giant Societe Generale, “I’ve rarely seen such
enthusiasm for the deployment and adoption of a newsolution.”
As a highly versatile platform, GitHub can be deployed as
on-premises, SaaS, or a hybrid of both with GitHub Connect.
Its advanced auditing and monitoring tools let development
teams work together and collaborate while meeting criticalrequirements within the confines of the secure, internalenvironment.

4Whether it is used on-premises with existing servers or in a
private cloud, GitHub can help DevOps teams boost overall
development efficiency with flexible deployment options,centralized permissions, hundreds of integrations, andtechnical support.
Key elements of GitHub include:

Collaboration
With pull requests and issues, collaboration and code review
are built into the development process. Internal and externalteams can share work, discuss changes, and get feedback
all in one place. This helps organizations share expertiseinternally and avoid reinventing field-tested solutions
developed for other projects.

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Community
As the largest open source community in the world, GitHub
brings the power of open source to teams at work. Teams
can tap into new projects, find solutions, and build better
software with support from developers around the world.
GitHub is how people build software. Trusted by millionsof developers and half of the Fortune 500, GitHub helps
DevOps teams of every size collaborate securely—anddeliver better customer experiences, faster. To start yourfree trial or learn more about GitHub’s solutions, visit
https://github.com/enterprise.

Security
Powered by machine learning, security alerts send
notifications when vulnerable dependencies are used
in a project. Since the launch of security alerts in 2017,
over five million alerts have been sent to help the GitHub
community keep their projects safe. Token scanning detects
and invalidates secrets pushed to GitHub. This enhanced
security allows companies to ship when they want to,creating an environment where companies can test andexperiment refactored legacy apps and optimize outcomes.
Branch protections also ensure changes are reviewed andhave gone through CI, GPG verifications, and audit logs.

Integration
GitHub supports custom tools and hundreds of third party
apps and services. Using services like Jenkins, CircleCI,
Travis CI, or BuildKite, GitHub helps automate workflows
according to a team’s production environment. The growing
number of tools and integrations are accessible at theGitHub Marketplace. They include Sentry for real-time,cross-platform crash reporting and error logging; as well
as issue.sh for agile project management inside GitHub,
without access to code.

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