How To Implement A Successful DevOps Roadmap

Source – forbes.com

According to a predictions piece from IDC, “By 2019, digital transformation investments will triple, drawing funds away from store capital and profoundly changing the retail industry.”

Christi Liebe, chief technology officer for Rent-A-Center and a Cigniti client, concurs with the IDC article, writing in an email, “We’re in the middle of a radical digital transformation. As part of this transformation journey, we are investing in driving significant improvements in our customer experience. In our efforts to break down silos between development and operations, increase velocity, code quality and transparency, we have a strong focus on building a DevOps culture, including end-to-end automation and a ‘you build it, you run it’ approach.”

There is a desperate rush among businesses to beat the competition and tap into the right consumer group. This has made the overall product/application development environment more complex and has increased the stakes. Along with faster time to market, even the software quality needs to be improved. Factors such as performance, functionality and security must be tested and embedded within software applications to bring business value.

Enterprises are empowering teams with contemporary tools, frameworks and methodologies to enhance the business value of their applications. DevOps has emerged as an approach of great significance over the years. It isn’t confined to one project’s execution plan; it goes beyond and blends with an organization’s culture.

Reasons For Taking The DevOps Route

DevOps is the result of a growing need for frequent releases and disruption in the market dynamics. At the core of DevOps is continuous development and delivery. Faster time to market, successful and frequent releases, shorter lead time and steadfast recovery are some of the compelling features of DevOps, along with the ability to segment projects into fragments providing overall project visibility. CIOs and tech leaders need to build organizations that are profitable, sustainable and innovative. DevOps enhances the ability to deliver better quality software and continue to innovate for better performance in the marketplace. In this way, the DevOps approach helps to stay competitive and upbeat.

A TechBeacon article confirms this: “Much has been written about what DevOps is, but not a lot has been said about what it can do for an organization. The trending software development approach has many quantifiable technical and business benefits, including shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, and faster time to market. But because it relies so heavily on increased communication, collaboration and innovation, it can also be a catalyst for cultural change within an organization.”

The article goes on to list companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Target, Walmart and Nordstorm as part of a group of “trailblazing companies that exemplify the possibilities of DevOps.”

Every software application needs to be updated on a real-time basis. Continuous testing and delivery make this feasible for teams to execute and achieve the desired development goals. Testers continue to be generalists, but there is a need for specialization. They need to build the capabilities to program, build and test an application with the DevOps approach.

The DevOps Roadmap

There are some strong benefits to DevOps that enterprises and development teams can take advantage of, but first they need to make a definitive roadmap for their vision of success. Here are several best practices that organizations must consider in order to implement a successful DevOps roadmap:

• First and foremost, it’s vital to understand if you really need to implement the DevOps practice.
• Once decided, break the culture of organizational silos, and encourage collaboration among the teams.
• Bring the focus back to the customer, and look to improve end-user satisfaction.
• Take small steps and then scale up.
• Automate whatever can be automated.
• Select compatible tools.
• Ensure real-time visibility into the projects.
• Integrate and deliver continuously.
• Implement robust monitoring and feedback systems.

DevOps brings much more than competitiveness to the table; it opens an exploratory window for developing and testing software applications in varying patterns. With DevOps and agile implementations in place, your company’s deployment times will fall substantially, thus increasing adoption rates of DevOps.

DevOps also offers intrinsic features that enable enterprises to test early and find defects way ahead in the software development cycle. Early defect detection is critical to meeting the needs of the market and overcoming the mushrooming risks — the idea of testing early will continue to rule the software development zone.

The application market is big, and businesses are driving profitability with their applications. This has led to hybrid structures that need to coexist. DevOps enables enterprises to support diverse aspects of cloud infrastructure with tools, processes and applications, and it helps them to coexist in a hybrid setup.

One of the key challenges of DevOps is that it grows in complexity, driving many IT organizations to seek tools that provide greater control and visibility over the entire DevOps process. This is bound to change with some key developments and defining processes. Tools such as Jenkins, Dockers, AWS and GitHub are popular for automating some of the processes of software delivery. Going forward, there will be a consolidation of tools for meeting continuous delivery requirements.

With applications getting more and more complex, the risks associated with them will rise, along with concerns pertaining to security. DevOps will continue to boost the idea of continuous testing and continuous delivery in organizations, bringing agility to the development process and ensuring quality, all while minimizing the risk of cyberattacks.