[siliconc0w]

* Automate configuration with Puppet or whatever. You should be doing this anyway. Not earth shattering.

Yes and it's very helpful to have a dedicated team of SMEs doing it. Otherwise you distract engineers who have to context switch to 'devops' mode and will, invariably, do a mediocre job. It's not earth shattering but I've yet to see an organization automate their infrastructure, configuration, and deploys without a team whose job it is to do it.

* One-step build and deploy. I'm still waiting for you tell me how these steps will solve my problems.

Because having a fast, reliable, and reproducible mechanism to push application changes is very valuable to most businesses that develop software.

* Culture of respect & trust, good attitude toward failure. How about "culture of stop fucking up"?

People fuck up. That is a constant. The challenge is building tooling and business processes that reduce or eliminate the impact of inevitable fuck ups.