Digital technology is for sure an important component. DevOps is the practice allowing reducing time to market of digital products and increasing their quality.
Now, is there a special, specific branch of DevOps in the space exploration industry (e.g. with much more influence from system engineering), or not?
I don't think there is a specific branch of DevOps in the space industry. Rather some customs of DevOps are slowly being adopted into the industry as software continues to become not only increasingly important, but also as the culture around software in aerospace changes. Software tended to get treated as a second-class citizen in comparison with other systems like propulsion. Granted, this depends on the type of software you work on in the space industry. If you are developing web applications or tools, I would expect that you have a more holistic DevOps workflow implemented. In my area, flight software, I have started noticing a growing trend in the community adopting certain DevOps features such as containers, continuous integration and testing. I only expect this trend to continue in this direction since DevOps has yielded great results in other domains.
