If you want to speed up the software development lifecycle, DevOps could be just what you need. Discover what this new paradigm is and how it can make your development process more efficient and reliable.
Your business depends on software being delivered in a timely manner. This software can be one that you sell to consumers or use internally to help make your delivery chains possible and empower your team to get things done.
When the software development lifecycle goes as planned, everything works perfectly. When software delivery slows down, it can trigger a domino effect across the entire company and its customers and clients.
When these bottlenecks and dominoes begin to disrupt software development, the results can be catastrophic. So what do you do to avoid these problems?
You don't panic.
You take a step back and look at the entire process to find out where the problem comes from. And there's a good chance you'll find out exactly where things went wrong. But how do you solve the problem? One route that has become incredibly popular among companies around the world is the migration from standard software development to DevOps .
This new approach to software development is possible regardless of the language your developers use: from C++ to PHP , .NET Core or JavaScript , DevOps can help improve your development lifecycle.
What is DevOps?
First, we need to define DevOps. The term is an amalgamation of Development and Operations that combines the two teams to create a much more fluid and efficient development process.
Think “collaboration” between 2 departments that should have been working together all along. In other words, your development team and your operations team collaborate throughout the entire lifecycle of a product, from design to deployment.
During this process, the development team will use many of the same techniques used by developers. For example, instead of GitHub being limited to just developers, the operations team will have access to the content in the repositories so they can help improve and even automate the process.
It is also important to know that DevOps does not differentiate between operations subdisciplines. So engineers, administrators, operations, release engineers, testers, database administrators, network engineers, and security administrators are all combined under the umbrella of “Operations”.
So how does this help speed up development? Let's take a look.
It's all about collaboration
Before adopting DevOps, there were departments working in silos, meaning one department did one thing and another did something completely different. Communication between these silos is not always ideal for the development lifecycle. Communication between isolated departments can be one of the biggest problems and make the process difficult.
With DevOps, these silos are removed and everyone can communicate freely and efficiently. This next-level collaboration can mean a remarkable acceleration of your development lifecycle.
Allows automation
Automation is the way of the future for development. With DevOps, you have a much better chance of integrating automation into your development lifecycle. Consider this: With DevOps, you can automate your lifecycle so that any change to your code repository can trigger certain actions. Say, for example, your developers update the code, which then triggers a build. After a successful build, automatic software deployment is triggered.
What this means is that your life cycle has not only improved dramatically, it has also become considerably more efficient. This level of automation will go a long way toward accelerating the development, launch, and maintenance of your projects.
Improved buildings
With the combined effort of Developers and Operations, the build quality of your software will be greatly improved. The reasons for this are numerous, but ultimately it comes down to more minds working together in a more collaborative environment.
When you cultivate this type of collaboration, everything will improve, including the quality of your constructions. You'll have more team members capable of examining areas such as features, performance, reusability, security, reliability, and deployability. Developers alone can only cover so much ground. By uniting these two worlds, the whole is capable of much more than the two working alone.
Time to hit the market
Of all the improvements you'll see with DevOps, accelerated time to market will be what stakeholders are most excited about. When the Development and Operations universes come together, the entire life cycle of your software is shortened, thus accelerating the time to market for your software.
One way this is possible is that your process can integrate tasks like Q&A and security across the entire lifecycle (instead of them being separate processes).
You will also find that DevOps decreases the amount of miscommunication that often occurs during a standard software development process. Because all of these teams are integrated, they can more easily avoid miscommunications, misunderstandings, and mistakes.
This makes processes much more efficient, which means your software will be ready for the public much faster.
Better user experience
When you have a UX (User Experience) team that works outside of developers, problems can arise. A UX team may have data that points to the need for a specific design element.
When these teams work separately, this idea may or may not be communicated effectively to developers. Otherwise, UX will have to be addressed near the end of the development process. This may require internal code changes, which may spread throughout the codebase.
With the UX team integrated into DevOps, you avoid these costly setbacks. This not only means software is delivered faster, but it is also more reliable and better designed.
Conclusion
Done right, DevOps can completely revolutionize the way your company approaches the software development lifecycle. In this revolution, you will find a dramatic acceleration of the process, which will not only delight your customers, but also strengthen your bottom line. This is a win-win situation.
If you liked this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.
- The wave of MLOps (machine learning and Devops)
- The 7 Best Continuous Integration Tools for 2023
- Understanding the DevOps Hype
- What is DevSecOps and why do you need it?
- What is DevSecOps?
