DevOps

"DevOps is a response to the growing awareness that there is a disconnect between what is traditionally considered development activity and what is traditionally considered operations activity. This disconnect often manifests itself as conflict and inefficiency."

-- Damon Edwards, "What is DevOps?" [1]

In agile business environments, DevOps teams are often responsible to ensure change and stability, and most importantly deal with the conflict that lies within those two areas. The term DevOps is put together from the two terms "Development" and "Operation", which are two classic departments in software companies. Development is responsible for all amendments, bug fixes and constant further development of the software. Operations is responsible for the software's stability. Both departments have interest that often conflict. The area around DevOps is supposed to solve this conflict and bring back agility to the static and sluggish current "Development - Operations" structure, which is continuously blocking itself.

Image from Dev2Ops.org

To ensure constant stability without constantly being distracted with monitoring and still being able to remain agile and open to change, new ways of metric measurements are necessary. 
Therefore, a major part of the DevOps movement is related to metric monitoring of so called KPIs (Key Metric Indicators) [3].
Ambient displays and Auditory Displays inherit potential to benefit for DevOps teams, as they provide a constant peripheral awareness of important metrics but are not necessarily a continuous distraction. 
DevOps is an area the research project could make a major contribution to and it proves to be a potential use case for the deployment of an ambient auditory display.

Image from Dev2Ops.org

Further research will be conducted through organizing an interview with the person responsible for Lead DevOps at the DataShaka office. After the evaluating the interview, installing an ambient auditory display triggering subtle sound events will be the next priority. Its impact on employees, operations and development as well as the office space in total will be evaluated.

References:

1. dev2ops. 2013. What is DevOps? - dev2ops. [online] Available at: http://dev2ops.org/2010/02/what-is-devops [Accessed: 17 Nov 2013].
2. Hüttermann, M. 2012. DevOps for developers. [New York]: Apress.
3. Reh, F. 2013. Key Performance Indicators or KPI. [online] Available at: http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/keyperfindic.htm [Accessed: 17 Nov 2013].