How DevOps Helping Businesses Deliver Real Value to Clients

23 JUL 2019

As you are aware DevOps has become a prime focus and is influencing the world of software a lot, in the last few years. Statista says that by end of 2019 DevOps is going to be the mainstream and its popularity is going to reach its peak. DevOps evolved long ago while many of us thought it was just a buzzword.

Below is the Google trend for the term “DevOps” and a hypothesis of its projected growth in 2019.

In the olden days, teams could work on a project for months (or even years) before releasing it to production but not anymore. Now customer expectations have gone up very high and in an always-growing field of competitors, even two-week cycles are considered too long. To remain competitive in the market most of the clients expect to deliver new features to production on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis. Though sometimes it becomes very difficult to manage these timelines it is benefiting the organizations to adapt the market shifts and technological changes. Ultimately companies run at the same pace as their competitors. Most importantly, it enables businesses to continuously deliver value to customers.

Everyone dreams of becoming better, faster and more reliable to their customers. But how can businesses achieve that? The short answer is through DevOps.

DevOps saves time by speeding delivery and eliminating lean time

Do you know which phases of the software development life cycle take the most time? None of them! Yeah, it’s surprising, right? Most of the time we do not spend more time in any of the development phases, but in managing these phases. Project Managers wait for a business analyst to provide the details scope, Developer waits for Project managers to get the plan and requirements to start with the development. Quality analyst waits for developers to finish their code, and developers wait for QA to tell them whether the code works. Both developers and QA wait for system administrators to deploy new releases to different environments. And sysadmins wait for the entire project team to tell them why deployments failed.

It is very sad to note that in most of the companies significant effort is spent on tasks that do not bring value to the company. Due to strong process and policies organizations abide to follow these processes which doesn’t add any value. Repeating the same set of manual tests over and over again does not bring value, yet this is a normal practice for many businesses. Handing over deployments to a different department when the team in charge of an application could do it themselves by executing a single command does not bring value, yet there are often separate departments for deployment.

DevOps enables seamless collaboration between teams

If we question “Who is solely responsible for a product?” Usually answer is “no one in particular”. The project team is responsible for that phase of product development where they are involved, but no one is in charge of a product from beginning to end.  Employee mindset is to focus solely on their assigned roles. This makes things more complicated.

Developers don’t always consider how their work affects testing and deployment since it’s not their responsibility. They may not even know how their applications are tested or deployed. The same can be said for all other departments. Sysadmins likely do not consider how much time others spend opening Jira tickets in order to deploy something. No one team considers the complete life cycle of an application, because responsibility is split among too many silos. There is a lack of empathy. Communication between teams is limited and one team does not understand how their actions affect the another.

DevOps plays a very vital role here by addressing the disconnect between teams by building empathy between all those involved in an application’s life cycle. The practice unites distinct teams into a single team that responds to a single product owner. It dismantles silos by creating self-sufficient teams fully in charge of everything related to their application from start to finish. Such teams are in charge of requirements, development, testing, deployment to production, and even monitoring and pager duty. They are in full control of what’s happening with their application.

As a result, there is nothing to be handed over to other teams or silos. There is no need for inefficient handovers in the form of Jira tickets, emails or other administrative hurdles. DevOps is all about cultural changes aimed at creating autonomous and self-sufficient teams in charge of the entire life cycle of one or more applications. Therefore, the creation of “DevOps departments” and the employment of “DevOps engineers” completely misunderstands what DevOps tries to accomplish.

DevOps is not about creating more silos, nor it is about renaming existing departments as “DevOps departments”. Instead, it’s about people working together to accomplish a common goal: the successful release of new features to production.

When everyone works as a single team focused on a single product, communication improves, the need for administrative overhead decreases and ownership is established. Working together and understanding how one department’s actions affect others’ to create empathy. As a result, productivity and quality increase, and costs and time to market decrease.

Eliminating lean time and automating repetitive processes inevitably increases the time teams have at their disposal. Saved time combined with better cooperation between those involved in application life cycles allows teams to focus entirely on actions that bring value by dedicating precious time and effort to solving problems and innovating.

For real innovation to happen, everyone in the company needs to be involved. Elimination of wasted time and resources, improved collaboration and decentralized innovation are the three key ingredients that allow organizations to focus on what really matters. They allow businesses to move from trying to catch up with competitors to be able to innovatively tackle today and tomorrow’s challenges.

Conclusion:

DevOps is obviously a great cultural transformation. And DevOps when combined with cloud solutions, they both become a Powerhouse together. Cloud and DevOps together offer amazing business impacts and digital transformation. But picking a Cloud Provider for DevOps is undoubtedly a time-consuming job. Star Knowledge would be the best cloud provider for gelling up your cloud & DevOps to achieve business goals directly.