High-performing IT teams are always looking for ways to adopt and use industry best practices and solutions. This enables them to overcome obstacles and achieve consistent and reliable commercial outcomes. A DevOps strategy enables the delivery of software products and services to the market in a more reliable and timely manner. The capacity of the team to have the correct combination of human judgment, culture, procedure, tools, and automation is critical to DevOps success.
Is DevOps the Best Approach for You?
DevOps is a solid framework that aids businesses in getting the most out of their digital efforts. It fosters a productive workplace by enhancing cooperation and value generation across all teams, including development, testing, and operations.
DevOps-savvy companies can launch software solutions more quickly into production, with shorter lead times and reduced failure rates. They have higher levels of responsiveness, are more resilient to production difficulties, and restore failed services more quickly.
However, just because every other IT manager is boasting about their DevOps success stories doesn’t mean you should jump in and try your hand at it. By planning ahead for your DevOps journey, you can avoid the traps that are sure to arise.
Here are seven essentials to keep in mind when you plan your DevOps journey.
1. DevOps necessitates a shift in work culture—manage it actively.
The most important feature of DevOps is the seamless integration of various IT teams to enable efficient execution. It results in a software delivery pipeline known as Continuous Integration-Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Across development, testing, and operations, you must abandon the traditional silo approach and adopt a collaborative and transparent paradigm. Change is difficult and often met with opposition. It is tough for people to change their working habits overnight. You play an important role in addressing such issues in order to achieve cultural transformation. Be patient, persistent, and use continuous communication to build the necessary change in the management process.
2. DevOps isn’t a fix for capability limitations— it’s a way to improve customer experiences
DevOps isn’t a panacea for all of the problems plaguing your existing software delivery. Mismatches between what upper management expects and what is actually possible must be dealt with individually. DevOps will give you a return on your investment over time. Stakeholder expectations about what it takes to deploy DevOps in their organization should be managed by IT leaders.
Obtain top-level management buy-in and agreement on the DevOps strategy, approach, and plan. Define DevOps KPIs that are both attainable and measurable, and make sure that all stakeholders are aware of them.
3. Keep an eye out for going off-track during the Continuous Deployment Run
Only until you can forecast, track, and measure the end-customer advantages of each code deployment in production can you fully implement DevOps’ continuous deployment approach. In each deployment, focus on the features that are important to the business, their importance, plans, development, testing, and release.
At every stage of DevOps, developers, testers, and operations should all contribute to quality engineering principles. This ensures that continuous deployments are stable and reliable.
4. Restructure your testing team and redefine your quality assurance processes
To match with DevOps practices and culture, you must reimagine your testing life cycle process. To adapt and incorporate QA methods into every phase of DevOps, your testing staff needs to be rebuilt and retrained into a quality assurance regimen. Efforts must be oriented toward preventing or catching bugs in the early stages of development, as well as assisting in making every release of code into production reliable, robust, and fit for the company.
DevOps testing teams must evolve from a reactive, bug-hunting team to a proactive, customer-focused, and multi-skilled workforce capable of assisting development and operations.
5. Incorporate security practices earlier in the software development life cycle (SDLC)
Security is typically considered near the end of the IT value chain. This is primarily due to the lack of security knowledge among most development and testing teams. Information security’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability must be ingrained from the start of your SDLC to ensure that the code in production is secure against penetration, vulnerabilities, and threats.
Adopt and use methods and technologies to help your system become more resilient and self-healing. Integrating DevSecOps into DevOps cycles will allow you to combine security-focused mindsets, cultures, processes, tools, and methodologies across your software development life cycle.
6. Only use tools and automation when absolutely necessary
It’s not about automating everything in your software development life cycle with DevOps. DevOps emphasizes automation and the use of tools to improve agility, productivity, and quality. However, in the hurry to automate, one should not overlook the value and significance of the human judgment. From business research to production monitoring, the team draws vital insights and collective intelligence through constant and seamless collaborative efforts that can’t be substituted by any tool or automation.
Managers, developers, testers, security experts, operations, and support teams must collaborate to choose which technologies to utilize and which automation areas to automate. Automate tasks like code walkthroughs, unit testing, integration testing, build verification, regression testing, environment builds, and code deployments that are repetitive.
7. DevOps is still maturing, and there is no standard way to implement it
DevOps is continuously changing, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach or strategy for implementing it. DevOps implementations may be defined, interpreted, and conceptualized differently by different teams within the same organization. This could cause misunderstanding in your organization regarding all of your DevOps transformation efforts. For your company’s demands, you’ll need to develop a consistent method and plan. It’s preferable if you make sure all relevant voices are heard and ideas are distilled in order to produce a consistent plan and approach for your company. Before implementing DevOps methods across the board, conduct research, experiment, and run pilot projects.
(Originally published in Stickyminds)
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