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The Area 51 question at "On why having a DevOps q&a website would be useful for many" is, IMO, the reason-d'être (reason to exist) for DevOps.SE. Especially this passage in it is so true:

... war between SOers doing sysadmin and SFers writing code

It also includes some details about these DevOps related areas:

  1. development support
  2. continuous integration
  3. continuous deployment
  4. monitoring

Comparing these areas to what is currently used as the DevOps baseline (or "mission", or whatever you want to call it):

Beta Q&A site for software Engineers working on automated testing, continuous delivery, service integration and monitoring, and building SDLC infrastructure.

My question: what happened to "develoment support"? Did that get removed somehow, or is this something to be considered as part of "building SDLC"?

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  • Yes, Sdlc is software development life cycle, so it include naturally support. That said, being less obscure on sdlc sounds a necessary improvement
    – Tensibai
    Mar 19, 2017 at 12:20

2 Answers 2

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In my opinion the Development Support is a big part of what this site should be about. But this is falling victim to the general notion of the early moderators frowning on process and culture questions that do not have specific technical answers. Restricting Development Support just to building SDLC is narrowing it to the strictly technical part of the problem, which will be counter productive. No technical solution can succeed without a cultural and process change. Unless we discuss the non-technical aspects of these issues, we are not just making this site less useful. We are specifically making it NOT DevOps.

The overly strict application of the SE rules is being used to justify this attitude and we need to find a way how to get around this mental limitation or this site will run into this issue at every level.

DevOps is a strange beast in a way as it is a mix of both Social and Natural science. There is a large tendency to limit the scope to simply just Natural Science. It is hard for a scientist to be both and if you judge a Social Sciences question through the lenses of Natural Science, it will often seem as too broad, off topic or opinion based. We deal with the social issues of the Software Development and need to be able to answer the questions from both technical and social aspect.

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  • 1
    Counter examples of your point How can I persuade developers on my team to embrace “You build it, you run it”?, What processes or tools enable Segregation of Duties when engineers both deploy and run code?, both well received without being absolutely technical.
    – Tensibai
    Mar 20, 2017 at 14:47
  • Finding 2 questions out of 200 does seem to be like finding the exception that confirms the rule rather than a counter example. But I hope to be proven wrong. here.
    – Jiri Klouda
    Mar 20, 2017 at 14:53
  • I think this answer somehow confirms my perception, i.e. I find it strange/bizarre to consider "Development support" as part of "building SDLC". Maybe @Tensibai should transform his (!) comment here (and also the one below my question) into an additional answer? Maybe Jiri should add a few sample questions to further elaborate on what he wrote in this answer?
    – Pierre.Vriens Mod
    Mar 20, 2017 at 14:54
  • Well, that's just 2 in the 15 most active, comments are limited in size, I won't list every question just to make the point.
    – Tensibai
    Mar 20, 2017 at 14:55
  • BTW, I agree with the on-topic and non technical question part. But the overall tone and accusations sounds more a rant toward people disagreeing with you more than a factual observation.
    – Tensibai
    Mar 20, 2017 at 15:18
  • Actually I've been sufficiently discouraged from contributing that I don't even have examples of people disagreeing with me on this topic. I am waiting for the public beta to see if the mood changes. I've also seen much reduced contribution from Evgeny, probably for similar reasons. But I am encouraged by some postings of Liath and Richard Slater. Time will tell.
    – Jiri Klouda
    Mar 20, 2017 at 15:39
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    @Jiri I'm sad to hear that, but I'm convinced part of your discouragement is due to the fact you think people are against some topics where they are against open ended questions whatever the topic is. That's a common misconception about close votes, I regret I have failed to explain this better despite our long talks.
    – Tensibai
    Mar 20, 2017 at 19:28
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    I'm still open to discuss it on fresh ground if you wish.
    – Tensibai
    Mar 20, 2017 at 19:31
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and building SDLC infrastructure

Building a Software Development Life Cycle infrastructure implies a cross support from ops to dev and from dev to ops.

So I'd argue it is on-topic for the site.

It is true the site description sounds too much technically oriented only, the definition phase of the proposal was not so oriented.

Maybe something like (not really good IMHO):

Q&A site for about automated testing, continuous delivery, service integration and monitoring, SDLC infrastructure and cross team support.

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