10 Ways DevOps Will Change Your Software Experience

Your DevOps team is up and running, you’ve chosen wisely and implemented tools everyone likes. Communication is online and everyone is used to communicating with each other constantly. You’re practicing Agile Sprints, posting new software faster than ever. Customers are beginning to ‘get it,’ wowed by the frequent updates they’re seeing.

How do you quantify this?

“As your DevOps team gets used to working together faster and more efficiently, you’ll begin to see changes in how you interact,” said Brandon Cipes, vice president of DevOps practice at Cprime. “There’s a snowball effect, where you’re learning to work together better, beyond increased productivity and speed.”

Here are some ways that DevOps might have a broader effect on your software experience:

1. Better Customer Service

• Customers benefit first of all, when you turn code around quickly and accurately. When they see meaningful technology updates regularly that have a direct benefit, it builds confidence in your expertise and ability to create a great software.

2. Collaboration

• You couldn’t have gotten here without everyone on your team internalizing the culture of collaboration that is the core of DevOps in practice. Breaking down silo walls means your team members are actively reaching out to each other, contributing to the quick software releases.

3. Improved Automation

• So much of your experience now is about the speed and accuracy of your releases due to automation. When the next event is automatically triggered, and everything flows in a sequence to an improved release, you have automation to thank – now an indispensible part of your work.

4. Better Customer Response

• You’re smoothly running Agile, lean DevOps team depends on fast responses from your customers. You’ll know right away if customers are disappointed in your software! It helps your team iterate more efficiently when it knows where to go based on the direction customers are pointing you. Now you pay more attention than ever to what your customers say, avoiding mistakes and costly re-dos.

5. Shorter Cycle Times

• Your review and release cycle becomes quicker and tighter when your DevOps team becomes more comfortable with automation and the speed of lean iterating. Your team has adopted good habits, releasing new software constantly, not just on an annual or quarterly basis.

6. Cross Pollination

• A funny thing happens on the way to a great DevOps teams: when your silo walls are falling, you begin to act and think a little more like the OTHER kind of members on your team. It’s inevitable that people on DevOps teams start thinking more like each other. That’s what DevOps collaboration does, when you’re focused together on getting software updated, fixed, checked and out the door.

7. Increased Efficiency

• 7. Increased efficiency. Working Agile, working Lean, keeping track of all your work with vision through online dashboards and communications systems – all these contribute to more efficiency. The old ways of doing things stop making sense. You have a shorter path to send software through the workflow. Increased efficiency is both the object and a side effect of a team that is collaborating and communicating well.

8. A New Point of View

• DevOps can be a little like moving into a new office space: adopting a new outlook, collaborating with people you rarely met or saw before. This gives you a new view into your work, using new eyes to see what may have become routine to you.

9. Employee Engagement

• When team members are working closely together, each one collaborating constantly as a valuable part of a larger, more important effort, their personal investment grows. As a team can predict successful software releases, the personal engagement of each team member is strengthened.

10. Scalable Organization

• Companies can scale when they have DevOps in place and their teams are automated, quickly iterating and posting new releases. This allows an organization to make plans to grow, add more DevOps teams that work as efficiently, continuing the cycles of fast, routinized production.

What’s next?