DevOps Transformation Success Mantra: 7 Ways to do it Right

The software world is constantly evolving to eliminate inefficiencies in processes and digitalize all realms of the current software ecosystem. In 2009, Patrick Debois gave the software world an evolutionary term ‘DevOps’ that offered a new perspective to the development process and changed the IT culture. Before 2009, software development and its operations were performed by two separate departments, with little to no overlap between these two tasks.

Broadly called the combination of ‘development’ and ‘operations’, DevOps holds different definitions for different people. Some call it a technology, some call it a tool, some call it a strategy, others call it a process. But in actuality, DevOps is a ‘culture’; a culture that companies need to adopt if they want to make their processes more efficient.

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Whether it is a well-established enterprise or a web-native organization, taking the DevOps route is the only efficient way for businesses to deliver client-centered solutions faster while maintaining the quality of the system environment. Companies that adopted Agile in their early stages are fast exploring the DevOps culture to growth hack their way into efficient working. Even biggies like Netflix, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have done wonders by undergoing the wave of DevOps transformation and so should you!

Want to know what’s the mantra that leads to DevOps transformation success? Let’s find out.

Hack Your Way To DevOps Transformation Success

In a world totally dependent on digital systems running on one or the other type of software, DevOps is not hype! Organizations of all scales and sizes, especially those using software to digitally innovate, undergoing DevOps transformation should not be an either-or option. It should be the way to go. The domino effect that faster software delivery with minimum flaws can have on any business’ growth is unimaginable. But how do you understand the language of DevOps culture, much less hack into DevOps transformation?

Here are the seven ways you can adopt DevOps transformation to not just do it right, but do it to succeed.

Mine Your Business Process

Every company is different and so are their DevOps strategies. There can be no one source of truth that every business can blindly follow. Businesses cannot blindly follow another’s DevOps culture. They need to bring about a change in their company’s IT culture that suits their business needs.

This is where mining the business process comes to the fore. Businesses need to know the critical processes in the system, the bottlenecks, and the glitches that are delaying the development process.

Go For Continuous Everything

Continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous integration, and continuous improvement- are the four pillars of the DevOps foundation. Any company on the path to DevOps transformation should apply continuous everything and continuous everywhere approach all the time. The goal is to reach the state of liquid software; a state where automatic updates would continuously flow into the systems through ‘software pipes’ without causing any glitch.

Testing, deployment, integration, and improvement when done continuously can help achieve the lean and agile state of the process. The thing with adopting continuous everything and everywhere is to have a parallel working space. This space encourages continuous updates in the software without any need for human intervention.

Adopt A Cloud-Native Strategy

Today’s hybrid world operates in the cloud. Most businesses shifted their operations to the cloud quite a few years back. And those that didn’t, 2020 made them do so. The pressing situations in the past year convinced the majority of the businesses to shift their processes and data assets to the cloud. And in order to achieve this, they had to adopt a cloud-native infrastructure.

This cloud-native methodology will help businesses undergo a successful DevOps transformation. This approach lets organizations maximize agility through CI/CD, which in turn enables them.

Cloud is becoming native to all organizations and if you want to boost collaboration, adopting a Cloud Native approach is the way to go. This strategy would provide businesses with a faster, more effective process of software development.

In order to adopt a true cloud-native strategy, you don’t just stop at microservices and containerization. You also adopt MVP development, rapid iterations, multivariate testing, and much more. The resilience, agility, observability, and operability offered by these cloud-native approaches support DevOps transformation.

Eliminate Silo Mentality

DevOps is a culture that can only be adopted by bringing in a corporate cultural shift in the organization. It can be successfully executed only by bringing together different departments and encouraging them to work in total harmony.

Silo mentality is a DevOps killer. So, the first thing the companies need to do for a successful DevOps transformation is to eliminate the silo mentality.

It is imperative that companies shift their departmental priorities and not believe in storing information. While taking ownership of their work, they should also pass on the other work to the required departments.

Businesses can also adopt a Center of Excellence within the DevOps team. But while doing so, they need to make sure that the codes, feedback, and all other information are shared with each member of the team. Build trust among teams in the organization. Remember DevOps practices always from the upper management to the next in the hierarchy.

Draft A Feedback Loop/ In-take Process

DevOps is all about continuous testing, iterations, and deployment. Having a well-defined feedback loop enables this process to be more efficient. The team members can easily tell about the bottlenecks in the process. Whether it is Scrum, performance monitoring, unit tests, code reviews, or any other form of a feedback loop to know the success of the particular sprint.

A great way to adopt this culture is with an agile methodology. Agile and DevOps go hand in hand. An agile mindset is what businesses need to outperform at DevOps. This methodology also promotes rapid iterations, daily feedback through scrums, and continuous process improvement. When agile is ingrained within the organization, a feedback loop is automatically adopted.

Make sure the feedback loop is small so that it becomes simple to process the feedback and eliminate any bottlenecks.

Automate What Can Be

DevOps need to be swift and the traditional process of manual cycles hinders its successful adoption. They need more speed and greater performance for successful DevOps transformation. This is where automation comes in.

The baseline for DevOps transformation is to deliver quality, quickly. Automating the processes helps organizations achieve this.

To achieve DevOps at scale, IT leads and the DevOps center of excellence need to identify the processes that can be automated and bring in the right automation tools. By automating the repetitive tasks, the dev teams can save time and effort in handling those tasks. Know your process in-depth and automate smartly to eliminate time-investment in repetitive tasks.

Identify Pilot & Be Iterative

Companies that think they can go all-in with DevOps and expect to see the results overnight are the first ones to fail. Identify the pilot application and bring together a DevOps team for that and work iteratively to adopt the culture.

Don’t be disappointed. Have patience when adopting DevOps. It is a paradigm shift that takes time. Each company has legacy practices that cannot be changed overnight. The teams need to analyze complete processes before executing the DevOps initiative.

SEE ALSO: DevOps and Security – how to build more than another stage into software processes

Key Takeaways

• DevOps transformation is paving way for a digital transformation and all businesses either running on or offering software need to adopt the DevOps culture to be on par with the competition.
• DevOps is not a tool or technology that you can adopt; it is a mental model transformation where each member adopts the same culture of continuous iterations, development, and deployment.
• DevOps transformation is about learning from the failures and delivering better performance, ROI, and time to market.
• DevOps is not an approach that you can copy from those who have succeeded. Every business needs to analyze its unique needs and bottlenecks to adopt a culture that makes it more efficient.
• DevOps transformation is not going all-in with this culture at once. You need to be very patient and let the employees transform themselves and their working styles to succeed.
• DevOps demands agility which can be promised only by integrating automation tools in the process.

DevOps has empowered several biggies like Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Not just in building software but even when choosing to get remote product development, companies need to ensure the outsourcing agency follows the DevOps culture. This would improve the quality of their product while also minimizing its time to market.

DevOps allows businesses to keep the software updates flowing without any human involvement. Adopting DevOps means adapting to the change prevalent in the software world to deliver quality with agility.