Adam Smith vs. fullstack developers - and productivity in DevOps?
There are two types of work:


Exploitation - Well defined work that can be easily divided into well-defined stages, where each stage can be learned and mastered on its own and handover between stages does not require communication.
Exploration - Undefined work, which requires learning and experimentation to accomplish each stage and handover between stages requires massive amounts of communication of all learning and status of the project. 


Adam Smith concerns himself wholly with exploitation and not at all with exploration. The work done in Research &amp; Development departments of the industry is by its definition mostly exploration and so it is not covered in any way by Adam Smith.

But we have seen that in later continuous improvement stages, which are partly exploitative work, the application of CI/CD can bring similar gains in productivity, which could in some way be probably traced down to Adam Smith by someone very imaginative.