Why DevOps Strategy
As organisations transform into agile development shops, they quickly realise there is more to delivering business value than creating software.
It’s about building software that runs in production. You can only achieve business value when users apply the software as intended.
There lies the problem: Traditional agile development focuses on shippable code, not released code. IT teams are incentivised to continually change the software, always focusing on new features, enhancements, and fixes.
Meanwhile, operations teams are focused on maintaining application stability and reliability. This is where a strategy can help.
Benefits of DevOps
Some of the benefits of adopting DevOps
- Faster delivery time
- High collaboration between teams
- Greater customer experiences
- Early defect detention
- Continuous Release and Deployment
- Innovative mindset
Need DevOps?
Traditional agile teams focus on delivering features at the end of sprints. Operations teams often queue up multiple teams’ sprints and bundle them into production releases. This adversarial gating process means it can take weeks, if not months, before developed features are available for your users.
Teams are myopically focused on their own work and not the work of the entire enterprise. Feature development is not celebrated for what IT delivered, but for what a team delivered. This makes it difficult for cross-team collaboration to occur. Many agile programs fail in this fashion, which served as a key driver in the development of the Scaled Agile Framework (Safe) methodology.
These forms of testing often occur after a sprint is completed and stories are marked as “done.” The challenge is the following: Any findings during these activities artificially exaggerate feedback loops and invariably create unplanned work.
Lengthy response times are symptomatic of internal silos that result from poor coordination and collaboration between development and operations teams.
Similar to the points above, the inability to deploy an individual feature means that intellectual capital is sitting in a code repository, depreciating in value over time. This allows the possibility of a competitor to beat you to the market. This also prevents the organization from achieving the earliest business value possible, negatively impacting ROI.
The inability to release quickly has an unintended side effect in that it lengthens the time it takes for a team to start working on a business partner’s need. The more time a team spends on “cycle time” – or the time it takes to complete work once started – the greater the slowdown in the backlog. Think of this like a traffic jam without an apparent cause. A simple slow-down causes a backlog that slows down all work.