Delayed projects, missed deliveries, and issues due to communication gaps between the teams are terms that we often hear in the IT world. The industry adopted agile methodologies for faster software development, but there are delivery and service management issues. With DevOps, you can automate deployment and make it a continuous process. Testing happens along with coding, and the deliveries are in the form of small batches.
The DevOps practices integrate all the stages of the product life cycle. Therefore, there is no confusion regarding product requirements, planning, deployment, and maintenance. People from different teams work together, can interchange roles, and have shared responsibility. Thus there is increased collaboration and trust. The aim is to bring a cultural change, make the developer closer to the user, leading to a better understanding of user expectations. Below we discuss the benefits of implementing DevOps practices.
1. Rapid delivery
With DevOps methodology, you can decrease the code to market time, enhance communication and trust among the team members, and provide quick resolutions for client issues. It is all possible as the DevOps system emphasizes automation. Here you create frequent deployment schedules. The process of code change becomes easy by automatizing testing and quality inspections. In the continuous integration technique, every change that you make is tested automatically, along with a check-in repository to keep the logs. Tools such as Mabl, Zephyr aid in automation testing. You can also have utilities like Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipeline to take care of code building, repository, testing automation, and production deployment.
For repeated tasks, you can implement practices such as infrastructure as code. The engineers can interact and control the server machines for deployments, patch updates, revisions, etc., via software code. The employees have more time to listen to the clients’ feedback. With Git workflows, it is easy to revert if required. Thus, the overall efficiency increases. The teams can innovate faster and bring value to the business. If you wish to adopt DevOps practices, you can hire the services of a DevOps consulting company. They can suggest the right tools, operational changes, and a culture adjustment suitable for your business.
2. Smart work
Having a DevOps team increases productivity. It requires a continuous integration platform. The developers have updated information on the production environment and can come with suitable code as per the system. Unlike the traditional method, testing does not need to wait till the completion of development. Here, testing and QA become an integral part of development. And, the developers join the customer calls to involve directly in operations.
In the continuous integration method, you consider every change as a release object. Thus, testing and deployment happen continuously. The team tries to automate the process in most of the scenarios. In many situations, there is no manual verification. At the same time, they prioritize the quality of the application by following monitoring and logging practices.
There are advanced cloud-based tools to capture and analyze data 24/7. They are not for checking the application performance alone. You have a toolchain to oversee the entire process right from planning, development to deployment and support. These include Jira software, Slack, Kubernetes, Docker, Github, AWS CodePipeline, BitBucket Pipeline, etc.
One can also opt for an all-in-one DevOps solution provider, where you need not worry about various tools. The aim is to integrate all the processes and have a correlated environment. For example, the team should understand the requirement, write the code, push it to production, and get the performance indices, user stories, and issues. Thus the differentiation in roles such as developers, testers, QAs, support team, etc., gets blurred but ensures clarity and collaboration among the team members. The work style gives people more time to manage unplanned work.
3. Increased Responsiveness
In the traditional systems where the teams have separate workstyles, there is always some time waste in handing over tasks. With the DevOps system, you have well-established processes and a proper workflow. You can allocate enough time for addressing issues and getting customer feedback. Moreover, there is open communication, and everyone gets the same notification of tickets via tools like Jira Software, Opsgenie, StatusPage, etc. Once you have a common system in place, you can train the employees to collaborate. The team strives for automatic handling of known vulnerabilities. They make use of application performance monitoring tools like AppDynamics, DynaTrace, and New Relic. Thus bug fixing is quick, and there is ample time for quality enhancement and innovation.
Final Thoughts
DevOps requires a shift in the working model with the integration of teams that operated in silos. When the system change is in place, it is necessary to have a clear vision. The key is to use the right tools and have automation wherever possible. A transparent working system, where every member is aware of customer needs, ensures faster and efficient product. The team becomes versatile, quickly adapts to the changing technologies, and delivers better. DevOps is the way to stay ahead in the competitive software industry.
