5 Key Factors That Will Likely Ensure DevOps Success

The term “DevOps” is derived from two words “Development” and “Operations”. In this process, the development and operations team work together (rather than in silos) through the SDLC to deliver software applications and services at high velocity.

Agile methodologies and lean approaches have become more ingrained over the years. But as they matured, more collaboration started taking place between the development and operations teams, which led to the introduction of a single combined process called DevOps.

The DevOps approach allows organizations to serve their customers better and offers reliable and faster delivery of software or solutions to the market. Its success primarily depends on the team’s ability to possess the right blend of process, culture, tools, human judgement, and automation.

Should You Consider DevOps?

DevOps creates a productive work environment with a focus on improving the collaboration between the development and operations team throughout the SDLC. Organizations leveraging DevOps can deploy solutions faster into production with shorter lead times and relatively lower failure rates than the ones who don’t. The response level is high, they’re also resilient to any production issues, and are better and faster at restoring failed services.

However, you shouldn’t jump into DevOps by just looking at the DevOps success stories. One needs to prepare and be prepared to encounter the pitfall during the DevOps journey. A well-planned DevOps brings certain positive effects into the overall project, and if stats are to be believed, developers in a DevOps environment reduce the time spent on unplanned works by up to 22%.

Essentials for DevOps Success

The five essentials that can ensure your DevOps success are-

1. KPIs Measurement

Key Performance Indicators or KPIs should be set and focused towards the completion of the goal. In addition to this, they should ensure good service maintenance as well. This would let you know where the problems lie in the process and how to tackle them before the issues become larger.

Since DevOps is based on Lean and Agile practices, the self-improvement of the team will also need to be prioritized. Most of the KPIs measuring methods would be based on the proven practices learned through switching to Lean and Agile.

Some of the KPIs that you should measure are-

Mean time to defect- This is the average time between defects created and defects identified.

Mean time to failure- This is the average time taken to encounter defects that may likely cause the system to fail.

Mean time between failures- This is the average time between two different failures in a system.

Mean time to resolve- This is the average time to resolve defects or issues.

2. Use Tools and Automation Only When Needed

Automating just anything or everything in the software development process won’t bring success to your DevOps. The right usage of tools and automation with the purpose of agility, productivity, and quality are key to DevOps. Yes, automation does help in many aspects of the process but it cannot overtake human judgement. The latter involves collective intelligence of the team through continuous and collaborative efforts, and derives valuable insights right from the business analysis stage till production monitoring. No tool or automation can replace this.

To make the best use of tools and automation, the entire software development team including the project manager, developers, testers, security experts, operation, and support teams should work together and decide on the automation areas and tools to be used. Automation should be done only in those areas that involve repetitive tasks, such as code walkthroughs, integration testing, unit testing, build verification, regression testing, environment builds, and code deployments.

3. Push Security Practices Early In The SDLC

It is important to ensure that the whole working environment is secure while using DevOps. The development and the operations team experts can create a secure environment through their collective efforts.

With DevOps, the security practices are also moved earlier in the development timeline which are usually considered towards the final stage. This is mostly because the normal development and testing teams don’t possess security expertise. The secret to DevOps success is that confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information security have to be put in place right from the initial stages of the software development life cycle so that code in production is secured against any threats or vulnerabilities.

Try adopting and executing practices and tools to make your system self-healing and robust. You can look to integrate DevSecOps into the DevOps cycles as it would help combine a security-specific mindset, cultures, tools, processes, and techniques throughout the SDLC.

4. Redefine Your QA Processes

Aligning with DevOps culture and practices calls for redefining your testing life cycle process. In addition to this, the QA team needs to be remodeled and retrained to integrate the testing processes in every phase of DevOps. The team must put in efforts to identify and prevent the software bugs in the initial stages of the SDLC and work towards rendering every release of the code in production robust, reliable, and fit for the company.

The approach also must be switched from reactive to proactive. The team should turn itself into a customer-centric and multi-skilled team that is capable of complementing the development and operations team, and derive significant value from every CI/CD cycle.

5. Project Lifecycle and Service

When we talk about the “Operations” part of DevOps, the focus isn’t only on the present things but also on things to follow. As the project comes to completion, the development team will begin looking at service maintenance as their focus will no longer be on application development. This means that going forward, the team would emphasize more on the relationship with its customers.

The product can continue to improve with regard to its features and functionalities. This lets the developers build an MVP and allow for the product to evolve.

After the product is released to the market, one should also possess a good understanding of what their deployment plan is, for example, whether the aim is towards continuous delivery or continuous deployment plan. While most DevOps teams would like to aim for the latter, it is not always a viable choice.

Conclusion

DevOps is still evolving. There isn’t any fixed single approach or strategy to follow in its implementation. Different teams define, interpret, and ideate about DevOps differently. You should draw a standard approach and strategy based on your business needs. Explore, experiment, and execute pilot projects before rolling out DevOps practices across the entire organization.