Many businesses are currently struggling to implement and effectively incorporate DevOps practices into their operations. As per a report by 2nd Watch 2018 on DevOps, almost 78% of the respondents stated that they have different teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development and 38% of the respondents say that they are managing infrastructure manually. This shows businesses are halfway in their DevOps journey and are wondering why they are not able to make most out of it. They are still looking for answers to questions like –

• How have we again missed the deadline for release? We are already having a DevOps team.
• Why there are a mismatch between developers build and product managers plans for what to include in the build?
• Why there’s still downtime and wait times?
• Why we are still having irregular releases with operational constraints?
• Why we are still depending on infra teams for the provisioning of environments?

If you are also looking for answers to similar questions, it’s time to realize that DevOps is not tools, technology or teams. It is a change in the way teams work to achieve Continuous Delivery automating build and testing with parallel monitoring and continuous feedback in place to ‘fail fast and fix fast’.

DevOps is no more a buzzword, but businesses are having a hard time finding the right way of adopting DevOps. DevOps is percolating in the software development lifecycle is at a rapid pace because emerging technologies need a new development lifecycle. The product and software innovation in trending technologies such as Mobile, Big Data, Cloud, Social, IoT, AI, and ML requires the need for agility and dynamism. The main reason faster adoption of DevOps is the consumerization of tools and technologies that drive the need for higher quality and faster delivery.

Let’s have a look into why Dev & Ops working in silos is not good for emerging technologies and what are the changes need to be done to move into a more collaborative culture of DevOps.

Dev & Ops – Two different teams incentivized differently

In traditional development, development teams are always encouraged to embrace change while the operations team are encouraged for creating a more stable environment, thus resisting change. Developers love change, delivery, and speed of releases whereas the operation teams look at being more consistent, the application being stable and available always. The problem arises as Dev and Ops working in different environments create a disconnected team, information, and perspective. The goal for both the teams is to achieve better business productivity.

Getting best out of Dev & Ops: DevOps

DevOps is an enabler of continuous delivery that ensures both quality and speed for the applications that are made available to the end-user. Continuous delivery changes the business model by shifting the operational constraints to decide application releases to business readiness to application releases, upgrades, products, features etc. with high quality, without compromising the brand value. This change in business model ensures that you are getting best out of DevOps.

The first thing is in implementing DevOps is to automate the delivery and deployment pipeline to create a feedback loop whenever the code is shipped to production. The key to achieving this is by automating the continuous delivery pipeline with feedback provided directly to the developer to fix bugs if any.

Second thing, your CD pipeline should be able to measure business outcomes as well as outputs. Faster deployments, achieving deadlines, eliminating downtimes are all outputs but there are significant outcomes such as customer retention, customer renewals, satisfaction rates etc. that reassures that your DevOps journey is pointed in the right direction.

There are several ways that organizations can bring together development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams to improve collaboration and achieve better outcomes:

1. Adopt agile methodologies: Agile approaches to software development emphasize collaboration and iterative development, which can help bring Dev and Ops teams closer together.
2. Implement continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines: CI/CD pipelines enable developers to continuously build, test, and deploy code changes, which can help reduce the time it takes for changes to be deployed to production environments.
3. Use shared tools and platforms: Providing both Dev and Ops teams with access to the same tools and platforms can help facilitate collaboration and reduce confusion.
4. Encourage cross-functional communication: Encouraging Dev and Ops teams to communicate and work together can help build trust and understanding between the two groups.
5. Implement DevOps practices: DevOps is a set of practices that aims to bring together development and operations teams to improve collaboration and efficiency. This can include things like using agile methodologies, implementing CI/CD pipelines, and using shared tools and platforms.

What we do at Qentelli –

At Qentelli, our core focus has been achieving Continuous Delivery for high performance, high velocity agile teams. We classify the phases broadly to achieving CD broadly as:

1. Continuous Planning and Development: Leverage engineering best practices and adopt a test first approach such as – TDD and bring in early testing like Unit Test Automation
2. Continuous Testing: To integrate QE/SDET integration test first utilizing BDD frameworks and approaches that tie in user stories and features directly to the methods as they get developed, and early functional and automated unit testing
3. Continuous Integration: Leverage automated trigger of unit and functional tests for every build /check in.
4. Continuous Build: Adopt build tools such as Maven for creating, building, publishing and managing dependencies during development phase to reduce time and effort
5. Continuous Deployment: Build a continuous deployment framework with DevOps tools, Test again Certify the build and move to higher environments
6. Continuous Monitoring and Measurement: Real User Monitoring is a start. Metrics across lifecycle and traceability are a mandate
7. Continuous Feedback: Testing in Prod (Functional), Real User Experience measurement and synthetic monitoring that enable a direct Feedback loop to dev / plan phase

To learn and explore more in detail about Qentelli’s AI-driven DevOps implementations, please write to us at info@qentelli.com. Our experts will be delighted to engage with you.

Headquartered in Dallas, TX with global delivery teams in India, Qentelli is an Industry Thought Leader in Quality Engineering, Automated Testing 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.