Businesses have been facing the age-old delivery conundrum arising from developers and operations not having a proper communication channel, resulting in operations having to deal with production issues. This issue caused several delays in the completion of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and hence increasing the time-to-market of the product. As a result, costs companies millions of dollars. DevOps rose to be the hero who salvaged this situation by bridging the gap between the two. It acquired application and infrastructure configuration by resolving the challenge that agile delivery faced by defining ownership and roles. This setup resolved the issues faced during delivery wherein developers would complain that the software application performed adequately in their development environments but caused problems once pushed to an IT configured environment. This post will explore the process of converting to DevOps.
Why does your business need DevOps?
DevOps allows companies to become agile, enabling them to keep up with the twists and turns of the market. DevOps decreases the time-to-market meanwhile improving the UX of your customers. CI/CD frameworks created using DevOps methodologies automate the entire software development process.
That being said, traditional companies face a lot of issues while trying to implement DevOps. They have trouble understanding where to begin their transformation. This article will enumerate the 5 topmost practices for converting a business to DevOps.
Let’s begin!
Top 5 Practices for converting your business to DevOps
Identify Resources
Before adapting to DevOps, you need to identify the resources that you have or need for its successful implementation. Identifying individuals who have knowledge of the latest DevOps tools in the market can be of great help. If your company lacks these resources then you should hire individuals who have extensive knowledge of DevOps frameworks. Cross-functional teams should be provided with different incentives to promote the model of DevOps. Create a new model that incentivizes delivering a better customer experience.
Your DevOps team will be responsible for everything related to software delivery. Aspects such as gathering resources for a project, planning, implementation, deployment, and maintenance, making them the most important team in your enterprise. Hence, they should possess the ardor to learn and deliver excellence in their work.
Establish a continuous testing environment
Once you have established a DevOps team, you should focus on the technological resources they need. It’s essential to provide them with accurate, recent information about the production environment, enabling them to plan deployment.
As the DevOps team will be involved in the entire service lifecycle, they need in-depth knowledge of the platform and infrastructure, as this will allow them to debug and troubleshoot software applications. Creating an automated deployment pipeline that enables the DevOps team to deploy fully automated scripts within minutes is pivotal. This pipeline should integrate continuous integration, continuous development, continuous testing, and continuous deployment into a single entity.
Implement agile principles
Following agile principles along with DevOps methodologies is the key to success. This cocktail will allow developers, testers, and analysts to have better communication channels. Following this path will reduce the deployment time and the number of bugs in the software, thus reducing the time-to-market.
Following agile methodologies ensure that CI/CD pipelines are effectively implemented. These methodologies enable you to get feedback from the customers as soon as possible, thus improving the quality and usability of the product.
Establish continuous deployment
Creating a continuous deployment system enables you to deliver continuously. This system doesn’t require the involvement of a human, each build gets automatically deployed after passing a test scenario. Continuous deployment allows organizations to deliver new updates and upgrades without losing the functionalities of the software application.
To successfully implement continuous deployment your developers should be good at coding, and your testers should create scenarios that aren’t redundant. When this structure is in place, your system will work without any hassles. But continuous deployment is not fruitful if the company doesn’t monitor the feedback it receives. Feedbacks allow users to assess the useful features in a software application, further improving the user experience.
Implement blue/green method
The blue-green method is a technique used by DevOps engineers to create two identical production environments allowing companies to reduce downtime. The blue environment is treated as the primary environment whereas green serves as secondary. This setup helps companies to route traffic depending on what stage a software application is in the software development lifecycle (SLDC).
This technique can put an end to any downtime that may arise due to app deployment. Furthermore, the blue-green method allows you to roll back to the earlier version of the software application in case of a bugged update by simply switching environments.
To Conclude
DevOps is a methodology that allows companies to reduce the time-to-market, meanwhile improving the quality of the product. While adopting DevOps, you should be realistic about your goals and expectations. The primary requirement for starting your DevOps journey involves getting the right resources and structure in your organization. After the primary goals have been achieved, it is necessary to create the necessary testing and deployment environments.
After all the preliminary changes, the most essential part is to establish and monitor crucial metrics. These metrics will allow you to gauge where your software is performing well and where it is lacking, allowing you to redirect your resources to the functionality that requires change. DevOps provides your business with expansive gains by streamlining the end-to-end delivery cycle. DevOps also creates customer feedback loops, ensuring that your customers are always satisfied with your product.
DevOps methodologies don’t just save your time and effort but also improves the quality of your software applications. If you’re planning to begin your DevOps transformation, then software testing company can assist you with the same.
