Continuity

Continuity is often understood negatively: as the absence of disruption, of interruption.

This is driven by a perspective from which disruption may have catastrophic effects, and must be avoided. However, accepting this perspective a priori is in itself a distortion of continuity. Continuity in the positive sense, axiomatized in mathematics by Dedekind and Weierstraß in the end of the XIXth century, is about controlling the effect of limited changes.

This is particularly true in the context of the dev/ops confrontation: what we see there is the mismatch between two concepts of 'continuity'. The operations view pulls towards overall (top-down) stability, whereas the development view favours incremental (bottom-up) changes.

Another way to look at this duality is to argue that modernity pretends to base order on organization, a system that must be preserved, that has been built in history (diachronic meaning, in saussurian linguistic terms), whereas postmodernity offers an emerging order (synchronic). The former is in fact subjective, biased towards the views of those who benefit from the system, who hold the power, whereas the latter aims at tools backed objectivity.

The efficiency of organization based order decays, and is thus sub-optimal, poorly adapted to react to changes impulsed from outside the system. The challenge is to cope with organic complexity (or is it complication, if complex, as opposed to simplex -the simplest solution to a given problem- describes quantitative rather that qualitative aspects?)

Isn't in fact the devops concept itself yet another desperate attempt at organization: classifying work responsibilities from a top-down point of view?