How to Accelerate Software Development by Adopting a DevOps Culture

Your business depends on timely software delivery. This could be software that you sell to consumers or use internally to support supply chains and empower employees to accomplish tasks.

When the software development lifecycle goes according to plan, everything runs smoothly. If the software delivery process slows down, it can cause a domino effect across the company as well as among your customers and clients.

When these bottlenecks and domino effects start interrupting the software development process, the results can be catastrophic. What should you do to avoid such problems?

Don't panic.

You step back and examine the entire process to understand where the problem originated. And more likely than not, you'll pinpoint exactly where things went wrong. But how do you fix the problem? One approach that has become incredibly popular among companies worldwide is shifting 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 the development lifecycle.

What is DevOps?

First of all, we need to define DevOps. This term is a blend of development and operations, which brings these two teams together to create a much more agile and efficient development process.

Think of the collaboration between two departments that should have been working together all along. In other words, the development team and the operations team collaborate throughout the entire product lifecycle — from development to deployment.

During this process, the development team will use many of the same techniques as your developers. For example, instead of restricting GitHub access to developers only, the operations team gains access to repository contents, allowing them to improve and even automate the process.

It's also important to know that DevOps makes no distinction between sub-disciplines related to operations. Engineers, administrators, operators, release engineers, testers, database administrators, network engineers, and security administrators — all are grouped under the common label 'Ops'.

So how does this help speed up development? Let's take a look.

It's All About Collaboration

Before DevOps, departments worked in silos, meaning one department did one thing and another did something completely different. Communication between these units was not always optimal for the development lifecycle. Communication between siloed departments can become one of the biggest problems and hinder the process.

With DevOps, these silos are eliminated, and everyone can communicate freely and effectively. This new level of interaction can mean a noticeable acceleration of the development lifecycle.

Automation

Automation is the way of the future for development. With DevOps, you have a much better chance of integrating automation into the development lifecycle. Consider this: with DevOps, you can automate the lifecycle so that any change in the code repository triggers specific actions. For example, developers update code, which triggers a build. After a successful build, automatic deployment of the software is initiated.

This means the lifecycle is not only significantly improved but also much more efficient. This level of automation will greatly speed up the development, release, and maintenance of your projects.

Improved Builds

Thanks to the combined efforts of developers and operations, the quality of your software builds will significantly improve. There are many reasons for this, but ultimately it comes down to more minds working together in a more collaborative environment.

When you foster such collaboration, everything improves, including build quality. You'll have more people who can examine areas such as functionality, performance, reusability, security, reliability, and deployability. Developers alone cannot cover such a broad scope. By merging these two worlds, the whole becomes capable of much more than those working separately.

Time to Market

Of all the improvements you'll see with DevOps, stakeholders will be most interested in faster time to market. When the worlds of development and operations merge, the entire software lifecycle shortens, accelerating its market release.

One way to achieve this is to integrate tasks such as QA and security throughout the lifecycle (instead of treating them as separate processes).

Additionally, DevOps reduces misunderstandings that often arise during the standard software development process. Because these teams are integrated, they can more easily avoid miscommunication, confusion, and errors.

This makes the process more efficient, meaning the software will be ready for release much sooner.

Improved UX

When the UX team works outside of developers, problems can arise. The UX team may have data indicating the need for a certain design element.

When these teams work separately, this idea may or may not be communicated to the developers. If not, UX will have to address it late in the development stage. This can lead to the need for internal code changes that may ripple through the entire codebase.

If the UX team is integrated into DevOps, such costly delays can be avoided. This not only speeds up the development process but also improves reliability and software design.

Conclusion

With the right approach, DevOps can completely transform your company's software development lifecycle. This revolution will lead to significant acceleration of the process, which will not only delight your customers but also increase profits. It's a win-win for everyone involved.