Before the introduction of DevOps, development and operation teams were isolated. The developers’ task was to write code, and the system administrators focused on the deployment of that code. Due to the lack of communication between these two teams, some impact can be seen on the teams’ productivity, and the performance, delivery, and maintenance of the product.
But with the introduction of DevOps, the agile approach has changed in a better way and improved the software development process. Now we must change the approach and team role for releasing frequent releases. Thus DevOps came into the picture to emphasize the collaboration of the two teams. It leads to increased productivity and performance.
In this article, we will highlight what DevOps is and its key principles that create the base for the benefits of DevOps.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of development and operations. This approach emphasizes the merger of development, operations, and quality assurance into a single process. It is an extension to the agile methodology but with better team collaboration.
If you have implemented the DevOps approach properly within your business, then you will enjoy benefits that cover the technical and cultural aspects of the development.
- High-quality product releases: DevOps helps in speeding up product release by using continuous delivery, faster feedback, and enabling developers to troubleshoot and fix bugs in the system in the early development stages. Implementing DevOps helps the team to focus on creating a quality product and automate several processes.
- Improved responsiveness: With DevOps, the specific IT team are capable of making the desired and quick changes as per the changing client’s request such as adding new functionalities and updating existing features. Thus increasing the time-to-market and value-delivery rates for your business.
- Better working environment: the main purpose of using the DevOps approach is for improving the team’s internal communication that will help in bridging the gap between team members and increasing productivity and agility. Teams that work on the DevOps approach tend to work more effectively and productively. This leads the teams to work together on the same problem resulting in quick problem resolution.
To leverage these benefits of DevOps, you have to implement it with the right strategy. DevOps is not a set of instructions but a philosophy that emphasizes cross-functional team communication. It mainly focuses on improving the way people work within organizations. The success and productivity of any organization will eventually depend on how they stick to the DevOps principles. For better understanding, we will be focusing on various DevOps principles that have to be employed.
DevOps Principles
1. Foster a Collaborative Environment
Earlier in the agile methodology, the main focus was on releasing small sprints and getting customer’s feedback for quick changes at the early stages. This feature has been extended within the DevOps approach that majorly emphasizes on team collaboration. This will eventually improve the productivity and performance of the team. Various teams come together to code, deploy, and test the product. This leaves a very small chance of errors in the delivered product. Working together will save the time consumed in the development.
If development and operation teams work together, they can work on updates and fixes efficiently and deliver the new product within time. This timely delivery of a product is good for both parties. This team collaboration even helps them to brainstorm and share various ideas for better development.
2. Combine the Incentives for Developers and Operations
To avoid conflict between the development and operation teams, the company should set a similar objective for both teams. Generally, the development team is assessed based on the speed to add new features to the product and the operational team is assessed based on managing the uptime during deployment. Both the performance metrics are different from each other but together they create the impression of any business.
When the goals for both the teams become common then the role will get shifted from “I write the code” to “I am responsible for the end product”. These cultural changes have improved the working environment for both teams by eliminating the inefficiencies in their performance.
Organizations must employ multi-skilled people who can focus on every development pipeline task and deal with all types of bottlenecks at the early development stage.
3. Minimizing Failure Cost
The main difference between the continuous delivery and the traditional release culture is how they manage and react towards failure. They do not consider the failure as a part of the SDLC process which is important to work towards improvement. But with the introduction of DevOps, teams started focusing on failures and tried to eliminate the fear of failures as they built a product in chunks. The main focus is to lower the cost due to failure by improving the way of working.
DevOps allows the team to break the deliveries into small parts, resulting in better management of each part and fostering productive cross-platform collaborations. If you notice, managing your product in small chunks will cost less. This strategy will help the developers to treat such failures as milestones in the process of software development. This leads to the creation of a performance-driven environment rather than blaming someone for those failures. In the end, the business will see the difference in the performance and productivity of the teams.
4. Automate All Possible Tasks
With DevOps, every task is processed in continuation and leaves no time to waste. For frequent product deliveries, you must minimize the manual work and automate most of the software development aspects. Well, there is no limit and restriction on how much automation you can imply to your SDLC pipeline. With proper automation, you can enable a lightning-fast user feedback loop. Sometimes focusing on high speed may become the reason for human-led errors. Thus you can automate the tasks to avoid errors and rework them to save the team’s time and efforts.
Automating tasks will not require manual interventions and are more effective than doing the task manually every time. You will be able to automate the various processes in the continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline like provisioning of infrastructure, creating new systems, deployment of software, and testing.
5. Improve Continuously
With DevOps, you will be able to improve continuously without any doubt. By eliminating the fear of failure, automation, and equal responsibilities of teams, DevOps has done a lot by contributing to the improvement of the entire working process. It allows you to manage and fine-tune the smallest detail of the system. Effective team collaboration will help in improving the product quality to some extent and make it easier to add new functionalities to the existing software without any hassle.
Conclusion
The simple approach and effective principles of DevOps have benefited many organizations. It helps in speeding up the development process to create and deliver high-quality software. Surely, the life of DevOps is not going to end soon. If you have implemented and followed the DevOps principle efficiently then you can leverage the true benefits of DevOps. Not only this, DevOps works well with cloud platforms making it the next big technology in the market.
To lead your company in the right direction of improvement, you can focus on various DevOps principles by implementing them well.