Introduction
In today’s digital world, organizations are getting digitally transformed by embracing disruptive technologies with new tools and techniques. They are highly focused on competing with the digital economy to enhance their performance at all levels. They need to boost flexibility in business-supporting capabilities, upgrade product quality, elevate financial performance and augment speed-to-market for customer-facing products. Agile and DevOps practices are critical in accomplishing these goals of efficient cooperation, collaboration, and bug-free code to sustain competitive adaptability.
Almost every organization working in a dynamic business environment today aspires to develop a sustainable operational model, through which it can swiftly respond and adapt to dynamic market conditions and minimize valuable time-to-market to preserve business value proposition. Leveraging on further developing this dynamic business model needs significant changes across different levels of the organization, primarily by following DevOps practices related to engineering, managing infrastructure and defining processes. This need for agility also reinforces collaboration between multiple technology groups and introduction of automation in software development and deployment process.
DevOps is one of the critical elements in a multitude of large organizations to bring agility, minimize time-to-market, and introduce superior quality products. Successful adoption of DevOps model demands exclusive investment, resources, cultural change and is an incessant journey. DevOps has become vital to enable Continuous Delivery and Agility in organizations. It helps organizations deploy solutions swiftly and steadily.
A study from CA Technologies revealed that 90% of organizations that implemented DevOps methods witnessed significant growth, including a rise in the quality of the software developed – from 17 to 23%.
5 Ways You Can Achieve ‘Agility’ Through DevOps
#1: Create a Culture-Oriented Structure
Culture is usually fused with organizational structure. DevOps requires a cultural change among teams. DevOps is a reorganization of the structuring of the teams and how they collaborate and work together. Organizations can appropriately use the tools and technologies only with the smooth collaboration of people with the team. The Development team should back the Operational team and vice-versa. Humans are different from robots, who don’t have the thinking capacity. Therefore, sequential waterfall model doesn’t combine with agile culture and natural thinking of humans. The traditional waterfall model can not only help in proactively addressing these challenges, but also bestow the benefits of DevOps model and align the organizational structure, which is the need of the hour. This will ensure the culture of the people are fused well with that of the organization, increase overall collaboration, and agility. This makes DevOps a natural continuation of Agile via the comprehensive value stream of software delivery.
#2: Streamline Methods, Practices, Policies & Processes
Modern DevOps practices enable organizations embracing them to:
- Specify processes that can provide a software development framework that is aligned with their prescribed set of policies and processes to ensure organizational stability.
- Provide engineering processes that allow continuous development of integrated software that can be incessantly deployed to higher environments.
The policies, practices and processes of the organization should be streamlined and tuned for the collaboration of the development, testing, infrastructure and IT teams. To achieve true agility in DevOps, the workflow, roles, responsibilities, and methods need to be re-examined. They need to be aligned with agile mindset or culture bordered on delivering mini steps and managing changes. This process can be somewhat complex since it is not as straightforward as superimposing weekly scrums onto the current processes. To work in a series of short efforts and truly execute production-ready code that can actually be delivered to customers, one needs development and operations working in conjunction with automation technology and all processes integrated to the maximum.
DevOps requires remodeled agile practices and methods to actualize infrastructure maintenance, incessant monitoring, automation, and support applications in a production environment. There must be continuous communication between development and operations teams for continuous integration, testing, deployment, and release.
#3: Harmonize Accelerated Development with Least Disruption
Accomplishing agility in DevOps requires you to optimize reliability and reduce disruption, which can be attained by harmonizing the principles of accelerated development, speed, and advanced scheduling. DevOps model helps in determining the right method and right agile testing tools to leverage Agile’s speed without compromising on quality. It enables organizations to strike the right balance to re-adjust and respond to the dynamic market conditions and profit from the new opportunities swiftly and efficaciously.
#4: Phase Out the Silos
In order to achieve true agility in an organization, the gaps between various functions – such as operations, development, and testing – that result in reduced operational efficiency should be bridged. Agility can be achieved by enabling continuous development, testing, and deployment, with functional processes and toolchain. This process includes a solid intertwining of teams, tools, and processes. Efficacious communication and collaboration among several functional teams are critical for the success of the DevOps model, which ensures zero impediments across various agile teams that are backed by the appropriate collaboration tools.
#5: Ensure Continuous Measurement
Feedback is a critical component in measuring the efficacy of DevOps and in creating a successful DevOps strategy. A DevOps model cannot succeed without proper and timely feedback. For each deployment, the fundamental metrics associated with time, cost, and quality should be captured. This data can then be analyzed over a period of time to decide about the efficacy and agility of DevOps and identify the improvement areas.
Some of the metrics such as cultural metrics related to team’s unity, conflict resolution time, pride and ownership are difficult to measure. But these cultural metrics are crucial in deciding agility and efficacy of DevOps. To scale up and ensure DevOps model remains Agile and relevant to organizations with exceptional deliveries, streamlining of overall organizational culture, processes, attitude, and toolchain should be undertaken. This requires seasoned teams to work together and focus on continuous improvement and continuous measurement.
Conclusion
DevOps technology is essential for an organization to ensure a smooth development process. DevOps, being a collaborative approach between Development and Operations teams, ensures operational capability. However, to ensure the success of a DevOps model, it is necessary to achieve agility, which can be realized by steadily deploying the agile practices.
About CloudFulcrum
CloudFulcrum with its mission of “DevOps as a Service” has been part of multiple successful Copado implementations across the globe with customers in BFSI, Health Care, Retail, Real Estate, and Technology verticals.
With our DevOps consulting, we help enterprises align their Digital Transformation goals to achieve higher efficiency, faster time-to-market, and better quality of software builds with early identification of arising issues, enabling continuous release of Salesforce applications.
