Correlations between a DevOps assembly line and manufacturing

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were mostly handcrafted and developed in small quantities. This approach limited the quantity a craftsman could create as well as the customer base they could sell their goods to. This process of handcrafting goods proved to be expensive, time-consuming, and wasteful. When Henry Ford began developing the automobile, he looked to identify a more efficient method of manufacturing goods. The result of his quest was to implement a standardization methodology and adopt a progressive assembly-line approach for developing automobiles.

In the 1980s and 90s, software engineering efforts would oftentimes drain company finances. This was the result of inefficiencies in processes, poor communication, a lack of coordinated development efforts, and an inadequate release process. Inefficiencies such as integration phases, manual quality assurance, verification release plans, and execution often added a significant amount of time to the overall development and release strategies of the business. As a way to begin mitigating these risks, new practices and processes began to take shape.

As a result of these trends, software organizations began to apply manufacturing techniques to software engineering. One of the more prevalent manufacturing concepts to be applied to software development teams is the manufacturing assembly line (also known as progressive assembly). In factories all around the world, factory assembly lines have helped organize product-creation processes and have helped ensure that, prior to shipping and delivery, manufactured goods are carefully assembled and verified. The assembly-line approach provides a level of repeatability and quantifiable verification for mass-produced products. Factories adopt the progressive assembly approach to minimize waste, maximize efficiency, and deliver products of higher quality. In recent years, software engineering organizations have begun to gravitate towards this progressive assembly-line practice to also help reduce waste, improve throughput, and release products of higher quality. From this approach, the overarching DevOps concept was born.