In the world of software, Continuous Delivery is one such development practice that present benefits to all the stakeholders (Development, Operations, Testers, Business teams). Continuous Delivery is for every organization driven by software, it is hard to think of business not using software.
Continuous delivery benefits people and requires changes around people for better adoption and implementation. It starts with Collaboration, change in skillsets, perfect hand-offs; Top Down drive for CD, Adoption of technology, Elastic Environments, Stronger Pre-Production and automation.
There are companies that are still contemplating investing in CD and some companies which think they are doing it are still running into deployment issues and code failures with every release. If you lie in the latter camp, it is time to rethink your approach towards it and look at the benefits you are getting for all the teams. It provides everyone with their share of benefits. Read on to know how Continuous Delivery benefits everyone –
Developers – More efficiency and reduction in tech debt
Developer team probably derive the best of the benefits of Continuous Delivery. Without tools and processes in place, developers spend more time in fixing code issues, instead writing new codes. Developers are pressed with looking into past codes written months back and waste time in fixing them. With deadlines approaching fast, they write low quality and less clean codes, compromising on the overall product quality.
CD enables proper feedback loop which speed up resolving issues when they are fresh in the mind of developers instead guessing and waiting till the end. Tools and processes for version control makes developers life easier by keeping track of the changes done in the project without being lost. Similarly, tools for automating provisioning of environments help in saving time and efforts, ensure compliance and security practices from the beginning of the development lifecycle. Continuous Delivery benefits developers in the ways mentioned below –
- Better end to end visibility to trace the changes and error codes
- Writing new and quality codes improving product quality
- Faster feedback loops
- Integrated compliance and security best practices
- Less dependency on operations
Operations – Less Firefighting, More Innovation
Traditional IT Ops is tasked to provide reliable, stable, optimized and highly available infrastructure. At the same time, they are working closely with the development teams to ensure environments are available, functioning at peak performance, make sure rolling out new environments doesn’t hamper the stability of old ones. This requires operations to keep on doing redundant work and achieve desired SLAs. In a non-DevOps environment, applications or systems going down is often being blamed on operations.
With CI/CD and DevOps, the lines between development and operations are blurring and everyone is responsible for overall application performance. In DevOps – Developers can provision environment whereas operations can understand code, creating a team of hybrid skillsets. This gives operations time to look beyond operational issues and contribute towards innovation. This allows operations to deliver environments quickly, testing with real users and shift from cost centre to innovation centre. Some of the benefits Continuous Delivery brings in for Operations are –
- Leading the innovation front for digital transformation
- Stable and highly available environments
- Efficient operations due to removal of unnecessary wastage, waiting times and processes
- Reduce bottlenecks and dependencies on each other
QA – Never ever shipping the broken code into production
The main job of quality assurance team is to keep software ‘ready to be deploy’ every time new code is written and merged with source repository. The aim is to accelerate deployment but in develop-first-test-later environment QA is a bottleneck and holding it back.
DevOps is fuelling faster adoption of Automation across the Development Lifecycle. CD involved functional testing and performance and security tests. This increases more confidence in deployments and keeping application deploy ready all the time. With DevOps, there are high chances of errors being caught by QA and fix it, before deployment. DevOps gives safety net of shipping code as tests are well integrated in the development cycle with automation. DevOps benefits QA teams by –
- Integrating QA in the development process
- Keeping applications ‘ready to deploy’
- Early detection and faster resolution of defects
- Quick rollbacks to achieve stable state
- Spend more time in writing new tests than executing redundant ones
Business – Features reach market faster
The business teams are looking for increase in revenues, better customer satisfaction, reduced costs, end to end visibility about the new launches, and data & insights availability to support decisions. DevOps fosters improved collaboration between development and business teams. Marketing knows when the next product is coming out, sales know what and when to up-sell and cross-sell and customer service knows when the next feature is rolling out and how they can help customers in using and understanding them. DevOps presents businesses with set of benefits such as –
- Businesses decide to go live, not the operational issues
- Faster time-to-market
- Improved customer experience
- More time in innovation rather than fixing
- Improve communication and collaboration
Integrating CD into your teams
Continuous Delivery and DevOps are more of cultural change and less of tools and technologies and as humans, we all tend to resist change. It is very crucial to make your teams aware of the benefits it brings in and how the teams adopting DevOps are running less into deployment issues making everyone happier.
Whether it is culture, process or technology transformation, Qentelli has worked with customers to mature CI/CD implementations or helping teams to adopt it better. Our expertise in this space has helped many enterprises and smaller organizations to realize and quantify the benefits organizations are looking for with DevOps adoption.
To learn and explore more in detail, please write to us at [email protected]. Our experts will be delighted to engage with you.
About Qentelli
Headquartered in Dallas, TX with global delivery teams in India, Qentelli is an Industry Thought Leader in Quality Engineering, Automated Testing, DevOps solutions and Continuous Delivery. With high performing engineering teams working in the dedicated Innovation Group, Qentelli brings design thinking to address complex business problems and enables Continuous Delivery across Enterprise IT through automation for its global customers.