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Agile, cloud-based applications rely on many automation tools—some of which integrate with each other nicely, others less so. At the same time, everything involved with creating, maintaining and operating a cloud-based application is evolving rapidly. It’s difficult for companies with limited IT budgets to keep up. In this fast-moving environment, companies struggle to plan for five, ten or fifteen years in the future, especially when it’s impossible to predict what the tools or infrastructure of the future will look like.

But planning for the future, whether it’s one or ten years down the road, is something all companies need to think about, even as they rush to clean up existing technical debt.

DevOps teams need to work together to handle the entirety of an application’s lifecycle, so creating teams that understand everything from security to networking to operations is crucial to success. In real life, finding people who already have all the knowledge necessary to fit in to a DevOps team is challenging.

When software developers write about their work, it’s often so laced with jargon that other stakeholders in the business can’t understand what the piece is about or how it relates to business goals. There are two components of this problem. One is technical terms, which can be hard to get around and sometimes do require a certain level of technical understanding to grasp. The other, completely avoidable source of confusion, though, is buzz words. So let’s start by defining common ones you hear all too often.

We all want to develop better software, faster—not just for the sake of having cool software, but because we use software to solve business opportunities and to create competitive advantages for companies. DevOps is a much-used buzzword that gets thrown around when talking about ways to deliver software more quickly—but there are misconceptions about what it is and what it is not.