DevOps Adoption - Why should you CFO care?
– By Abishek Bhat
ISV
DevOps
Introduction
IMPACT OF AGILE SOFTWARE DELIVERY ON REVENUE NUMBERS
A recent survey commissioned by a leading technology provider reveals an average of 19 percent
revenue increase directly attributed to the adoption of DevOps methodologies. A drill down to the
most common financial attributes of DevOps adoption provides more clarity. Automating the
software delivery benefits the organization financially in multiple value areas:
- Revenue gains from enhanced developers productivity and reduction of IT headcount waste
- Revenue gains from accelerated time to market of new functionality
- Gains from cost reduction of application failures resulting from increased quality
- Gains from flexibility in the IT environment
A recent survey commissioned by a leading technology provider reveals an average of 19 percent
revenue increase directly attributed to the adoption of DevOps methodologies. A drill down to the
most common financial attributes of DevOps adoption provides more clarity. Automating the
software delivery benefits the organization financially in multiple value areas:
As we all know, applications are a key driver to the growth and success of today’s businesses. Visibility
into application performance and the efficiency of the software development lifecycle reaches far
beyond IT and well into business stakeholders. Applications are complex and fast evolving, and with
the expansion of mobile and web consumption demanding flexibility to handle constant requirement
changes effectively, businesses are forced to reassess their application delivery strategies. Coping
with the need for change requires more than a strategy! It calls for an ever-expanding budget without
clarity on the financial benefits of adopting agile innovations.
New software development methodologies have emerged to address the need for agility starting
from development practices to full automation of the software release process. This collection of best
practices has matured into the continuous delivery (CD) process, which applies industrialization
concepts to software. Designed to streamline and accelerate software delivery while ensuring that
reliable software is released, CD creates an alignment between the application and changing
business needs.
The principles of CD find their roots in the DevOps movement, established to bridge traditional gaps
between software development and the operations team running applications. DevOps automates
manual testing and release processes by replacing them with scripted procedures. It extends Agile
development in building applications incrementally to include the full integration, testing, and
validation phases. By streamlining application delivery across the entire development lifecycle,
applications can be iteratively developed, automatically packaged and tested, and then released to
production in a continuous, rapid, consistent manner. The CD archetype establishes the notion of an
ever-evolving production-ready version of the application in a functional, deployable state
throughout its lifetime.
This whitepaper delves into the disruptions in software delivery focussing on DevOps and its power to
positively influence revenue figures.
Background
DISRUPTIONS THAT HAVE IMPACTED SOFTWARE DELIVERY
“The earlier you catch defects, the cheaper they are to fix.”
Cloud technology has commoditized IT environments, creating freedom of choice for running
production applications. On demand, flexible computing capacity changed the economic models for
application infrastructure. Cloud allows infrastructure decisions to shift, based on cost assessments
and real-time traffic patterns rather than cumbersome IT dependencies. Consequently, the
production environment becomes less predictable and can change multiple times during the life of
an application.
Modern applications are becoming infrastructure-agnostic and developers must adjust their
processes to support application delivery practices in which the business logic code is portable and
can run virtually anywhere. Enabling the organization to take advantage of production flexibility
requires the design to anticipate hybrid and changing production environments. Developers cannot
rely on a single production target over the lifetime of the application. New systems of engagement, in
particular, the vast expansion of mobile and web application access, force companies to react quickly
to shifts in end users’ behaviour and adjust to scale and usage pattern swings.
The ability to develop and deliver high-quality software faster is crucial to companies trying to
capitalize on mobile use expansion, creating rapid and massive shifts in application workloads. The
majority of development projects still have not reached a level of maturity that can address a rapid
delivery mind-set.
Early DevOps initiatives focused on accelerating software delivery, and changing the culture to
establish better collaboration. DevOps promotes stronger communication skills and gives
developers a wider responsibility over the application. Overall, the intent is not for a single entity to
cover both application development and management, nor to encourage developers and operations
to perform each other’s duties, but rather smooth the collaboration between these groups.
The requirement for more multidisciplinary skills for developers created a new DevOps role
combining application development skills, IT operations understanding, and infrastructure
automation techniques. IDC’s 2014 survey revealed that 43 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies’
respondents were already using some DevOps practices. An additional 40 percent were evaluating
DevOps methodologies.²
Understanding the Devops Movement
WHY DEVOPS MAKES PERFECT SENSE TO CFOS
The DevOps movement, initiated primarily by developers, laid the groundwork for comprehensive software delivery automation practices that gradually matured. Software can now be delivered at will rather than at planned intervals, hence CD. Adopting a CD methodology requires not only a change of mind-set but also a change of tools, standardization on new processes, and implementation of best practices. Integrating the proper tools into the release process automates distinct manual tasks and synchronizing steps in the release cycle. At its best, such a process requires no manual intervention other than quality control and regulatory checks, in essence industrializing software development. Companies implementing CD practices are therefore industrializing software manufacturing by applying an assembly line approach to the software delivery process.
Automation of manual tasks and consistency of the environments minimizes the amount of repetitive
error-prone work done by developers and reduces IT headcount waste. Developers also spent
significant time on problem resolution and maintenance versus developing new functionality. A CD
process that incorporates comprehensive diagnostics methodologies, including static and dynamic
analysis, significantly reduce the time developers spend on problem resolution.
Much like an automated assembly line, CD allows the software manufacturing organization to
produce new, reliable code on an ongoing basis. Delivering enhancements to address the current
market needs and security threats drive direct revenue and provide a competitive edge. Deriving
experience from numerous consulting engagements, Trigent estimates the business impact of
accelerating time-to- market credited to shorter cycles depends on the industry and is specific to each
company, averaging 20 percent and increasing when software drives the majority of the revenue.
Trigent Software finds a 20 percent average reduction in time to market and a 21 percent growth in
new functionality delivered to the business. Flexibility in the software manufacturing process not only
ensures faster delivery of revenue generating applications, but it also enables more advanced
organizations to adjust their IT infrastructure costs based on changing market conditions and price
fluctuations. Companies increase their profitability by scaling their environments up or down based
on demand, transitioning between cloud vendors or hybrid environments, and taking advantage of
the flexibility in the commoditized IT space.
Quality is one of the major concerns and a usual driver of high costs and project delays. Application
errors are expensive and negatively impact organizations in the form of reputation damages,
customer loyalty, and direct financial impacts. Improving application quality is often the trigger behind building a DevOps practice. The National Institute of Standards and Technology indicates that
the cost of finding errors in production are 6-30 times higher compared to identifying them during the
development and testing cycle. The actual costs of fixing defects discovered in production can
become tremendous when the software is embedded and cannot be easily updated or when the
application processes high-value transactions. Quality improvements and earlier defect detection are
bigger adoption drivers in such applications. CD provides best practices for optimizing each stage in
the application delivery process.
An automated manufacturing assembly line assumes a reliable, consistent, and high-quality supply
chain. To achieve code consistency and quality, development teams adopt Agile software
methodologies and mandate the use of diagnostics tools at the individual developer level while
automated testing and environment provisioning assure that high-quality standards are maintained
all the way to production.
Essential Guidance
Communicating DevOps business value is critical to securing additional funding and accelerating the
rate and course of change in an enterprise. Finance is the language of business. As such, DevOps
teams should consider the following business metrics to communicate success:
- Productivity: Speed, velocity, and how much faster the team is executing through faster code development, impact analysis, build and test automation, configuration automation, and time to market
- Quality: Improved availability, deeper requirements analysis, early business stakeholder support and involvement, security and compliance risk reduction, and identifying issues earlier through continuous testing and integration
- Operating expense: Cost avoidance/optimization, doing more with what you have, fail fast and fail cheap cost modelling, and allocation/bill of IT
- Capital expense: Improved utilization, cloud-based systems, and convergence
Extensive combinations and edge/hand-off scenarios were designed to ensure maximum application feature coverage. Cross-browser/compatibility testing was performed using BrowserStack. Additionally, given the velocity of change, Trigent periodically conducted bug bash sessions that uncovered more than 300 bugs in the MVP, enabling the organization to assess its product for a beta release. As a seamless extension to the product team, the Quality Engineering team understood the newly implemented functionalities. Trigent’s domain expertise and understanding of the application functionality enabled the team to develop strategies that helped them to write test cases.
Understanding DevOps Maturity – Key Principles
For DevOps cultural change to mature into effective CD practice, the IT leadership must adopt and
embrace a number of key principals.
- Production readiness : The fundamental principle behind CD is the ability to deliver a production-ready release on demand. The organization must reach a maturity level in which the application code is always in a production ready state. Production readiness does not necessarily mean that the application is deployed to production on a continuous basis, but rather the organization retains the ability to do so at will.
- Uncompromised quality : Software quality cannot be compromised at any point and the development organization has to prioritize high quality over new features. Ensuring a consistent high quality requires developer's responsibility and proper tooling. It demands tiers of comprehensive testing: Unit testing and static analysis before build and automated functional testing, load, and endurance testing with proper runtime diagnostics tools in place. Quality failures abort the build process until resolution.
- Repeatable delivery : The entire software delivery process from build through staging to production must be reliably repeatable so that each iteration is performed in an identical manner. This is achieved by adopting IT tasks automation. Repeated manual tasks that are prone to errors and inconsistencies are also wasting expensive IT resources and time. Automation of these tasks is a prerequisite to any successful CD process
- Frequent build and integration : A CD environment operates with the notion that changes to the application code between build cycles are minimal. Agile, incremental development is practiced alongside CD to ensure that the development project is broken into short iterations. Builds are triggered on all code checked-in to ensure that problems are isolated and addressed quickly
- Application stack consistency : The application stacks should be consistent and automatically provisioned to eliminate environment configuration inconsistencies. Consistency also accelerates the developer's and IT problem resolution capability as it reduces the failures related to application external dependencies
- Diagnostics and application management: High code quality requires problem detection and immediate resolution as defects occur. Fast and meaningful diagnostics data becomes critical to a successful CD implementation. Static analysis and dynamic analysis tools are sequentially deployed during the build cycle providing developers with the insight and drill down data. Lack of developer insight and diagnostics information allows defects to slip through and delay the ability to deliver a quality build.
- Broad test automation coverage : Test automation is a prerequisite to ensure high quality and production readiness. Unit tests and multiple layers of automated functional tests are implemented to identify potential issues and regressions. Developers are required to develop unit tests for each submitted piece of code.
Summary
MAINSTREAM ADOPTION OF DEVOPS
DevOps practices see a significant rise in adoption across industries, though misconceptions tend to
delay implementation of a complete CD process. That gap is often a factor of initiatives driven by
developers compared to a comprehensive company strategic move. The perceived upfront
investment is often considered too high, but moreover, there is a notion that establishing a CD
practice is a massive undertaking that interrupts the organization for a considerable length of time.
Trigent has found companies that have adopted or are looking to adopt DevOps practices see cost
and time as their primary barrier to move forward. Since CD is evolving from a collection of DevOps
practices that can be implemented independently, over time and to different degrees of maturity,
each of these — continuous integration, test automation or release automation delivers business
value autonomously. It is, therefore, more common to see companies adopting distinct elements of
CD first with less disruption to the organization, and maturing gradually to demonstrate end-to-end
automated release capability.
Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, and other industry leaders are publicly known for their ability to deliver
new features quickly to production. Facebook, for example, developed principles and a management
style that pushes its developers to continuously innovate and improve. The developers are moving
and learning fast even if things get broken in the process. Facebook released new code to production 3
twice a day5, using a dedicated release team and developing tools to ensure that new changes do not
cause functionality outages. Amazon established its leadership as an Agile powerhouse releasing
code to production hundreds of times each day. Impressive as these capabilities are, most
organizations do not need to operate at such production release rates. That said, adoption of CD
delivers significant productivity, efficiency, and financial benefits even when the organization doesn’t
require frequent deployments to achieve its business goals. This is a fundamental difference between
continuous deployment that suits primarily vendors providing online services and continuous
delivery, which provides organizations with the flexibility to release at, will. In fact, many enterprise
DevOps organizations that implement CD keep sufficient and strict acceptance validation and
authorization gates prior to actually pushing an application package to production.