Effective DevOps is about optimizing the factors that support efficient development, and ensuring that the architecture needed to support any development efforts are sufficient.
Steer
Determine future business goals with customer and user participation. Determine resources needed to complete goals.
Build
Develop and test on a continuous basis and collaborate with users as the project progresses.
Deploy
Release to customers and users value added work soon after it is completed and ask for feedback.
Operate
Continuously monitor completed goals while looking to incorporate improvements using customer feedback.
[Steer]
Plan and Measure
Continuous Business Planning
The top management leadership team should determine what the organization’s problems are and then set up visions (goals) to correct them. The plan should be to use Agile development and DevOp principles, but only doing the ones needed to achieve the goals. The resources necessary to meet the objectives then have to be determined along with the metrics that will be used to monitor the progress of the development teams.
To ensure continuous improvement and clear up bottlenecks it is important the metrics be available to the leadership team so they can intervene and provide assistance to teams having problems.
[Build]
Develop and Test
Agile Development
Agile development and DevOps work best together for development purposes. DevOps main goal is to increase dramatically an organization’s IT deployment rate of value added product. It is able to do this by incorporating both Agile and lean development principles of small teams, small batch sizes, and smaller but much more frequent software releases. DevOps also builds on infrastructure as code along with continuous integration and continuous deployment. Note, however, that Agile is not a prerequisite to have before DevOps can be adopted. DevOps relies on an incremental approach of doing automatic testing frequently in order to catch and correct defects early on.
Automated Testing
Since coding is set up to be released in small increments, test automation must be implemented to deal with up to thousands of tests on a daily basis. With automated testing, you want the ability to localize errors and identify where they are coming from.
Via automated testing, DevOps also integrates working code on a constant basis across multiple teams to check that the code received from the various teams all integrates together without causing error conditions.
[Deploy]
Release and Deploy
Continuous Integration
A key Agile development principle calls for incremental product delivery where value added product increments are released for the stakeholders use as soon as possible after their completion rather than at the end of the project. This allows for continuous user feedback while the project is still in a process of being completed and minimizes the time, effort, and cost of incorporating changes.
Another key element of Agile development and DevOps is that the entire software life cycle of plan, design, develop, test, document, and release is repeatedly done in a timely way over a series of sprints.
[Operate]
Monitor and Optimize
Continuous Customer Feedback and Optimization
Agile development and DevOps work well together to optimize the IT value stream where an organization’s business needs can be converted into services and capabilities that provide value to its customers on a continual basis.
With DevOps, code written for a new functionality is already in production. This allows a new feature to be run and tested by company personnel prior to its release to the customer. When it is decided to go live with the new procedure, it can then be done on a piecemeal basis to one or a small group of customers.
Based on customer feedback it can then be released full blown to all customers; or if there is a problem, rolled back automatically. The company can also perform experiments in production to test new business features.
With DevOps, the development, test, and operations departments of IT all work together as one team to help each other. The benefits that will result if DevOps methods are used will be faster implementation time for a project with higher quality and the ability to absorb changes as they occur.
Take your organization to another level
Contact us to schedule a consultation with our Agile bred DevOps professionals.The quality of the communications = the fit of the deliverable
If you can only improve one thing in an organization, communications should be at the top of the list. Without the right level of communications, and more importantly, cooperation between your IT development and operations departments, the underlying structure that supports your corporate applications will either:
- Fail to keep pace making your organization sustainable to outages.
- Will likely be over-built thereby costing your company more than is necessary.
A typical scenario is when the load from development has outpaced the supporting hardware. As more and more applications developed by your business are added to your current system, your user data grows, and your systems become more and more fragile. Due to either a lack of system upgrades or the wrong upgrades having been implemented. Both situations usually occur because of ineffective communications of requirements between IT development and operations. The result is that the primary duty of IT becomes firefighting just to keep your existing systems up and running; however poorly.
If continuous firefighting is the modus operandi for your company, you need to consider moving to communications integration optimized for DevOps can revolutionize the focus of your business. Correctly applied, you can move your focus from outages and blame to strategy and innovation.
Proven methods & blueprints for achieving successful alignments
Agilest® has methods and blueprints that will improve the communications between the development and operations sides of your organization. Ensure that in spite of growing systems complexity; your costs will be kept in check by making sure that hardware is not oversized, or undersized for the current and upcoming needs of the system.
If you choose to work with Agilest, you will discover that internal software development you can get right, and right-sizing systems to support an evolving application structure does not need to be ambiguous and stressful.