In the first week of Efficient DevOps with SAP, Dirk Lehmann introduced CALMS(Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing) as important for building a DevOps culture.

Since the introduction of abapGit, it has followed many of the CALMS concepts,

Culture

Everyone in the world can contribute to abapGit, across companies and organizations of all sizes. There are no silos, and everyone has full transparency into what is ongoing, and a full public listing of bugs and feature requests.

There is full autonomy, most contributors use their own spare time for contributing, so contributions typically happen in an area of interest or if a feature is needed.

Automation

With contributions from different sources, the need for automation quickly arose, this has lead to more open source projects like abapmerge and abaplint which helps new contributors with fast feedback regarding their code suggestions(pull requests).

This also makes sure the codebase is consistent and avoids most of the tedious code review tasks.

Sharing

As the abapGit culture is open, many share their experiences in blog posts. And there are currently 189 open source projects listed on dotabap.org using abapGit.

Documentation and API documentation is shared like the code, letting the community help keeping it up to date.

Failing Fast

Every increment is delivered and can be used by the community as soon as it’s merged to the default branch. As things fail fast, they can also be fixed fast, and abapGit follows the OPEN Open Source principles, where 20+ people have access to merge to the default branch.

Closing

Culture is an important part of CALMS, it is important to build open culture based on top of open software. If the tools used are closed and siloed, building an open culture will not succeed.

Still, some large organizations fail to accept the existence of successful open source tooling like abapGit, and these are the exact companies that will fail to build a CALMS culture.