The rapidly growing competition and innovation have changed the application delivery to continuous evolution rather than a large scale, project-based development. These new philosophies and practices in the IT industry are unifying development and operations end-to-end, leading to the growth of DevOps. DevOps brings development, operations, and testing engineers together in a cross-functional team that will be responsible for faster and continuous delivery of applications and its various improvements. These improvements may include reducing human errors, bugs, and enhancing version control. However, these are only one side of DevOps implementation.
The DevOps journey is not limited to technical aspects; it also expands to policies, processes, people, and culture which are concerned to the top level of the organization. Yet, most modern companies focus on these aspects only as an afterthought. The changes must flow top-down, by establishing the rules, process, and culture first. Therefore, you will have to dissect implementation in two layers: leadership and application.
SIGN UP FOR ALERTS
New tech meets financing:
Agility as a Culture:
Business leaders are responsible for strategizing and creating a line of businesses (LoBs) that include the core business and internal functions. Ensuring uniformity in culture, policies, and tools across different LoBs, be it: data warehousing, developers team or the IT department is crucial for successful implementation. While organizations often cautious about uniformity in tools and policies, organization culture is often overlooked. This results in a negative business impact and can fail the entire DevOps project. In today’s fast-changing ecosystem leaders must act as change drivers, creating an organizational culture that promotes innovation and agility to support dynamic IT infrastructure.
This transformation in DevOps requires training, mentorship, behavioral change, assessment across all levels of the organization. Cultural and change management experts should approach DevOps with a concrete roadmap of implementation, milestones, and feedback loops.
While business leaders are involved in governance and strategizing; on the application level, there are several best practices that organizations must adopt for effective implementation.
Organize Application Cluster
Identifying dependencies among related applications and grouping them in clusters based on release time and strategy is key for successful implementation. This allows for the harmonious implementation of DevOps to all applications within a cluster, thereby promoting consistent release speed and quality.
Pilot Testing
Organizations can make a small investment to pilot a few selected applications to test the initial DevOps improvements and benefits to others. To identify these pilot applications, companies use different analytics techniques such as cost-benefit analysis, application characteristics analysis. If the outcome of testing meets the goal, the companies can then continue with other applications and further layers of adopting.
Continuous Integration and Delivery:
At the heart of DevOps adaptation are the continuous integration, delivery of applications and different improvements. Organizations use numerous tools and techniques to ensure successful DevOps implementation. Be it: application lifecycle management, automated analysis, or the deployment tools, these help to ensure an uninterrupted DevOps process throughout its lifecycle.
While DevOps success depends largely on the underlying cultural shift, tools are still important. Cloud applications and a combination of cognitive technologies such as Artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping in automating – testing, monitoring, and deployments processes, playing a key role in transforming a DevOps implementation project.
NEWSLETTER
Stay up to date with our insights, news and events