How DevOps Can Speed Up the Software Development Process?
Gaurav G.
Mar 2, 2022
DevOps
From the waterfall model to agile development, IT firms have been always trying to optimize their software development process and are on the lookout for new development models and methodologies. DevOps entered the scene a while ago and is considered one of the most functional software development approaches today.
With the help of DevOps service providers, companies are able to achieve better customer satisfaction with the fast delivery of products and frequent updates.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is an integration of the software development and IT operations team, arose to solve the issues because of the gap between the development and production environments. DevOps services include a blend of technology, method, practices, and people, to help teams to coordinate and collaborate to build better products.
DevOps service companies will have teams that adopt the DevOps culture, who will have the ability to acknowledge customer needs better, build robust applications and deliver products much faster. This will enable them to tailor the applications aligning better to the client and their customers’ needs. A change of the mindset of the engineers and a set of new tools are required to adopt this culture.
DevOps service providers promote better communication between their teams, automation of every process possible, aligning projects to business requirements, and iterative software development. DevOps also brings significant modifications to the traditional software development model, workflows, and work environments.
How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps is not a technology. It is rather the application of a set of methodologies. It is often illustrated as an infinite loop consisting of stages of software development like planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, monitoring, etc.
In DevOps, the IT team will code the software, satisfying the user requirements, and will deploy it without any delay. After collecting feedback from the first run, it goes through the first iteration for improvement. Thus it also includes feedback of the stakeholders and the customers in the development process itself, aligning the software to requirements and expectations from the very start.
As most of the processes regarding code management are automated in DevOps, a lot of time is saved in moving the code from one step of the development to the other. Reviewing of changes is also done without any delay and is ensured that they meet the release standards. The changes are deployed individually for the ease of tracing issues.
Once issues are detected, code improvements are done through thorough analysis and continuous feedback channels. Basically, anyone in the team can participate in the analysis of the issues at hand.
Meanwhile, IT operations administrators can guide the team on how to use the resources competently and soundly, to tackle the problem. This culture of collaborating and sharing skills is also a part of the DevOps culture and will increase the quality and will help pace up the software deployment.
DevOps Culture
Cultivating a DevOps culture will require people to change the way they work and collaborate. It is all about better understanding between developers and operations, and sharing responsibility for the products they create. When DevOps service providers adopt this culture, they’re also creating a setting for high-performing teams to develop.
As said earlier, better collaboration between teams and alignment with goals and measures of success are features of DevOps culture and this can be only achieved when different teams like the development and operations, plan the work together. Therefore, all the teams will be participating in more phases of the lifecycle instead of working in just one phase dedicated to their roles.
DevOps service companies promote releasing software in short cycles to keep agility. As the progress will be cumulative, it makes risk management easier and diminishes the influence of changes on system stability.
DevOps teams should adopt a growth mindset, as constantly improving and hastening innovation are the purposes of the DevOps culture. This will require incorporating learning into their processes as there are always potential development opportunities.
DevOps Practices
Establishing a DevOps culture isn’t enough to be called a DevOps team. There are certain practices to be applied throughout the product lifecycle to improve the processes and workflow.
Version Control: Code is managed in versions and edits in the code are tracked for the ease of reviewing and recovering. Git is a popular version control system that allows collaboration between developers and handles complications in the code and restores it to earlier versions. Using version control is fundamental in DevOps and is necessary for continuous integration.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: DevOps service providers regularly integrate their work such as code changes into a central repository, using a version control system. While pursuing changes, it is ensured that they don’t affect any changes done by the developers working parallelly. A release pipeline is created to automate the making of infrastructure and deployment processes.
Agile software development: This approach gives importance to collecting user feedback and improving and adjusting the system based on the customers’ needs. It includes short release cycles for better adaptability.
Configuration Management: A configuration management tool is used to automate, monitor, and design configuration processes which are usually handled manually. It is made sure that the systems are maintained in the desired state and they perform in a consistent manner.
Continuous Monitoring: Tools are incorporated to monitor each phase of the DevOps lifecycle to lookout for risk issues and to confirm the performance and reliability of the application as it goes through the phases. Nagios is a widely used open-source tool for continuous monitoring, providing real-time visibility into the performance of the application.
Benefits of DevOps Services
Getting ahead of the competition while delivering quality products within a much shorter time is the primary outcome of the DevOps approach. With the assistance of a DevOps service provider, a firm will be able to relish these benefits.
Rapid Deployment
Customers always love new features, updates, and bug fixes. By adopting DevOps, you’ll be able to deliver updates much more quickly and frequently.
DevOps practices such as automation, continuous delivery, and constant feedback will help the IT team to make the software development process faster and more coherent. Automating the infrastructure creation and deployment will smoothen the workflow and the collaboration between different teams throughout the life cycle will offer continuous feedback.
Quick Anomaly Detection
As continuous monitoring and continuous testing always keep the application in check, most of the defects and issues are solved in the development stage itself. The continuous feedback sharing between teams also helps in this.
This will further improve the quality and reliability of the software by figuring out the most effective way to test the software before deployment.
Customer Satisfaction
Optimized software products are always customer favorites. An application with lots of bugs and which crash often definitely won’t offer a smooth experience for the customers.
Since the delivery pipeline is automated, the reliability and stability of the application are ensured after every new release. When they execute faultlessly in the production itself, it’s sure that they will perform well in the work environment.
Scope For Innovation
As DevOps services enable a company to deliver software products rapidly, it saves a lot of time for the developers to experiment with new tools and features and improve the existing software. They can take their time to authenticate their new ideas without any distraction from an ongoing project.
DevOps encourages teams to learn new techniques and upskill themselves so they can deliver better products in the future which reach up to the customer expectations better.
Stronger Security
DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps, including the security team along with the development and operations teams. It conveys that the security features of the application aren’t the sole responsibility of the security team. It helps to reduce costs by tracking and detecting security issues in the early stages of development itself. This is a lot better than spending too much on security after the product’s release. DevSecOps also accelerates the speed of recovery after a security issue or breach is detected.
Conclusion
With the everchanging market trends and increasing competition, implementing DevOps services is a great way to stay ahead of the game.
Just like any other product that’s made, the approach taken to build software affects its quality. Along with the efforts to market an application, companies should also start to focus on the lifecycle of their product and the tools used, instead of just buying a product and deploying it right away.