A starting point for a better software development life cycle is to first identify and eliminate those activities that add little or no value for either customers or the company, or does so at a slow pace. Once these are removed, it will be easier to focus on improving the software development process and product development.
To do so, you first need a strategy that’s aligned with technology. Think about how you can deliver more customer value and reduce cost? How can you drive your company to improve communication flow, drive more incremental value, and deliver higher quality software? Simply put, how do you achieve faster delivery, lower costs with more flexibility?
Here is where DevOps enter the game and how it can be a game changer. DevOps is at the heart of any successful software lifecycle. It provides time and complexity benefits by providing an efficient framework to engineers for software development and testing. It enables teams to leverage standard market tools to enhance their productivity. Evolving computer networks bring with them a number of operational challenges and opportunities to save costs which can be addressed by DevOps.
DevOps is not a “thing”. It is not a magic bullet. DevOps is a set of organizational philosophies that define how product development is done. DevOps depends on selecting appropriate development tools that enhance the development process and enhance communication and collaboration between all of the groups involved in product development: Engineering, integration, testing, the customer, etc. DevOps helps to deliver features faster, stabilizes operating environments, improves communication and collaboration, thereby providing more time for innovation. Once DevOps processes are established within an IT organization, organizations can experience greater customer satisfaction, cost reduction, and a more reliable product.
The DevOps implementations vary from company to company, but there are key elements and practices that all organization should always use as a common basis. For example, the assembling of major DevOps elements such as Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment, source code management, configuration management and provisioning, creation and configuration of virtual development environments, etc., have been supported by best practices and tools in the market. Open-source tools like Vagrant, Ansible, Puppet, Jenkins, Docker and others can be used to create a consistent DevOps infrastructure.
Puppet surveys about DevOps and the effect that DevOps has on businesses, says that high-performing IT organizations deploy products 200X more frequently than low performers. These organizations have 24X faster recovery times and 3X lower change failure rates. Lean management and continuous delivery practices create conditions for delivering value faster and sustainably – spending 22 percent less time on unplanned work and rework. For network security issues alone, these DevOps IT teams spend 50 percent less time remediating security issues.