20 DevOps Mistakes That Undermine Speed, Security And Collaboration
By bringing together software development and IT operations, the DevOps strategy aims to shorten development cycles, speed deployments and improve product reliability. But some all-too-common DevOps practices and patterns can create bottlenecks, introduce technical debt, cause team friction and even increase security risks.
To unlock the full potential of DevOps, teams need to break away from outdated habits and flawed assumptions. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council call out practices that not only undermine DevOps goals, but can also stall progress, strain collaboration and compromise security.
1. Relying On Manual Tweaks And Ad Hoc Scripts
Relying on manual tweaks or ad hoc scripts to manage infrastructure is counterproductive. Without repeatability, teams get stuck troubleshooting and redoing work. Every infrastructure change, including container deployments, should be handled by preconfigured automated scripts or systems. Changes become consistent and easy to roll back or redeploy, creating a more reliable and scalable process. – Ben Ghazi, Codiac
2. Skipping Documentation
A common DevOps anti-pattern is skipping documentation in favor of “just automating it.” While speed may increase initially, the lack of context leads to brittle pipelines and tribal knowledge silos. Without documentation, scaling becomes chaotic, onboarding slows down and debugging turns into guesswork, which turns DevOps from agile to fragile. – Rishi Kumar, MatchingFit
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3. Prioritizing Deployment Frequency Over MMTR
In my experience, a critical DevOps pattern that should be left behind is prioritizing deployment frequency over mean time to recover. You may be shipping fast, but without fast recovery, you’re automating fragility. Looking through a platform engineering lens, observability and rollback paths must be core to delivery. And from an offensive cybersecurity angle, slow recovery isn’t just ops debt; it’s an open door for exploitation. – Kiran Elengickal, Siemba
4. Overlooking Continuous Learning And Collaboration
Organizations often leave behind the human element and neglect to build a culture of continuous learning and collaboration. Without that, DevOps becomes just a set of practices rather than a mindset, making it harder to adapt and innovate effectively. This oversight can create gaps that slow down progress and introduce unnecessary risks. – Pooja Devaraju, Google
5. Relying On A Single Team Pattern
DevOps often works in silos. While siloed work is still necessary, teams need to move to a two-pronged approach: a scrum team that strictly follows a backlog of their own and a kanban team that works on items for all teams in a shared services model. Relying on only one of these team patterns will lead to long-term disruptions. – Santosh Ratna Deepika Addagalla, Trizetto Provider Solutions
6. Forcing Everything Into CI Pipelines
A counterproductive practice is the notion that everything needs to be run from a CI pipeline. DevOps is there to ensure harmony between different (previously disconnected) processes and increase the velocity of shipping code. That might take the form of CI pipelines in some cases; in other cases, it might take the form of in-IDE automations, Git hooks and so on. Forcing everything into a CI pipeline is often pointless. – Abhay Bhargav, AppSecEngineer
7. Deploying On Fridays Or Holidays
The most counterproductive practice is deploying to production on Fridays or before a holiday. Teams rush deployments to meet arbitrary deadlines, increasing errors. When incidents occur in off hours, exhausted engineers fix them under duress, leading to Band-Aids, not solutions. A Friday deployment gone wrong often means a full weekend of firefighting, which erodes work-life balance and morale. – Pratik Badri, JPMorgan Chase & Co
8. Separating DevOps From Infrastructure Processes
DevOps should not be independent and separated from infrastructure-related parts of the development process. The more developers are engaged in the entire vertical of their work, the better—from the infrastructure they use to write code, gather requirements, and do R&D and architecture design; through testing; all the way to integration, documentation, and even business development and support. – Viktor Trón, Swarm
9. Prioritizing Speed Over Stability
One counterproductive DevOps pattern is chasing speed at the cost of stability. When teams rush to deploy without care, they trade short-term wins for long-term chaos. Code breaks, trust fades and burnout grows. True DevOps is not a race, but a rhythm where pace meets precision and progress is built to last. – Brett Husak, PayBlox
10. Treating DevOps As A Department, Not A Workflow
A counterproductive practice is making DevOps an organization and not a set of processes, roles and technology that needs to be managed as a set of workflows with KPIs, like any other business process. Coupling development, verification, deployment and operations together as a defined business process with a set of performance KPIs and associated workflows keeps everyone working together to deliver what the client desires. – Richard Ricks, Silver Tree Consulting and Services
11. Building ‘One Size Fits All’ Platforms
One counterproductive DevOps practice I have experienced firsthand is trying to build a “one size fits all” platform for the entire organization. It seems like a smart idea to standardize tools, pipelines, security and compliance in one unified solution. But in practice, especially in a large enterprise, it often creates more friction than freedom and may deviate from solving business problems. – Ravi Laudya, SAP Concur
12. Using Manual Testing For Critical Audio And Voice Features
One counterproductive DevOps practice is maintaining manual testing for critical audio and voice features. This is problematic because it slows release cycles, increases errors and hinders the continuous delivery and quality assurance that are crucial for delivering high-quality user experiences in systems like hands-free calling or voice assistants. – Harshal Shah
13. Delaying The Integration Of Security Until The End
Failure to integrate security early in the development life cycle is a counterproductive practice. The outdated approach of treating security as a final step rather than a continuous process leads to costly, risky vulnerabilities. Security must be automated, embedded and prioritized by developers from the start to effectively manage risks in today’s fast-paced DevOps environments. – Chris Wysopal, Veracode
14. Focusing Only On Tools, Not Culture
Treating DevOps as a tooling checklist rather than a cultural shift is a major misstep. Automating pipelines without team alignment only speeds up dysfunction. True DevOps needs collaboration, not just CI/CD badges. – Sumit Bhatnagar
15. Relying Too Much On Manual Deployments
A common counterproductive DevOps practice is relying heavily on manual deployments. This slows down release cycles, increases human error and hinders scalability. Automating deployments with tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins improves consistency, speeds up delivery and supports CI/CD best practices. – Priya Mohan, KPMG
16. Restricting Access To Essential Tools
One counterproductive DevOps practice is restricting access to essential tools, especially for engineering teams outside of DevOps. While the intent is usually to protect the systems, this often backfires. Engineers waste time waiting for access, and initial permissions are rarely sufficient. This bottleneck slows development, adds operational overhead and discourages experimentation. – Sonam Kanungo, Crusoe
17. Overautomating Without Governance
A common pitfall is overautomating DevSecOps pipelines without standardization and governance. Isolated scripts and unaligned efforts lead to redundant tools, fragile workflows and scaling issues. To fix this, enforce governance, reusable patterns and a center of excellence. Adopt release-specific version control, code reviews and standard tool chains. Standardize before scaling. – Harikrishnan Muthukrishnan, Florida Blue
18. Neglecting Rollback Strategies
A very common counterproductive DevOps practice is neglecting proper rollback strategies during deployments. Many teams focus heavily on pushing updates quickly but lack streamlined rollback mechanisms if issues arise. This oversight increases downtime and recovery complexity. Prioritizing seamless rollbacks ensures faster recovery and minimizes user impact during failures. – Joseph Olorunyomi, Accomplishr
19. Treating Infrastructure As A One-Off Project
One common counterproductive DevOps practice is treating infrastructure as a one-off project rather than code. Manually configured environments are hard to reproduce, audit or scale, leading to drift, downtime and fragile deployments. Embracing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) ensures consistency, version control and automation, which are core to reliable DevOps. – Nibedita Baral, 2KGames (Take-Two Interactive)
20. Implementing Rigid Ticket Workflows
Overly rigid ticket workflows slow DevOps teams down. When developers and designers are already aligned, forcing tasks through every stage for the sake of “process” adds unnecessary friction. Agile DevOps thrives on collaboration and flow. Processes should support delivery, not create bottlenecks. – Aishwarya Suresh, Medtronic Inc.