What is DevOps?
DevOps is definitely more than a buzzword (although it’s starting to fall into that realm). And it’s more than a passing fad, too. Understood and utilized properly, DevOps can streamline your business processes, adding value by eliminating waste.
At its core, DevOps (development + operations) involves coordinating software development, technology operations, and quality assurance to make these three, sometimes disparate entities, work together seamlessly.
It’s a tall order, especially in traditionally-run development organizations where everything is compartmentalized and depends on the waterfall or similar method. DevOps works especially well in an Agile environment, so if you’re looking into establishing some level of DevOps, but are not yet Agile, you may want to reconsider taking on an Agile transformation first.
DevOps emphasizes communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers and IT operations personnel. Think of DevOps as the union of function with form, as it involves the overall application of Agile principles across product development and operations teams.
As DevOps bridges the disconnect between operations and development teams, it allows developers to incorporate operations functionality into products and have an operations mindset, and allows Operations to be involved early and throughout the development lifecycle, treating operations as part of the product.
This methodology eliminates inherent opposition between these two teams – development always pushing for new and better features, operations always striving for stability – which naturally creates development bottlenecks regularly as the push for innovation and deployment conflicts with the need for quality control and testing.
Including QA and other operations functionality directly in the development process eliminates these bottlenecks to a large extent.
DevOps is based around a concept known as feedback loops – a system for providing constant real-time feedback between departments so that problems can be caught earlier in the development process rather than waiting until users are inconvenienced and complain. Eliminating the lag in waiting for customer service to notify IT, QA, or the development team.
The end result is a faster, more streamlined development process that combines the best of both worlds into one lean, mean software developing machine. This saves time and money by creating efficiencies, eliminating wasted effort, unnecessary duplication, and missed defects.
If that sounds like just what your organization needs, let’s discuss DevOps solutions that may just fit the bill.
