Other than it being a cross-functional combination (and a portmanteau too) of the terms and concepts for “development” and “operations,” academics and practitioners have not developed a universal definition for the term “DevOps”. Most often, DevOps is characterized by key principles: shared ownership, workflow automation, and rapid feedback.

From an academic perspective, Len Bass, Ingo Weber, and Liming Zhu—three computer science researchers from the CSIRO and the Software Engineering Institute—suggested defining DevOps as “a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality”.

However, the term is used in multiple contexts. At its most successful, DevOps is a combination of specific practices, culture change, and tools.