Ways to Speed Up Product Development with DevOps
Developing a digital product, whether it’s an app or a website or anything in between, requires substantial resources, planning, preparation, continuous and rigorous testing, and optimization to name just a few key processes. Needless to say, you can only hope for your product to be successful if you manage to roll it out into the market before your competitors do, while ensuring top quality and customer experience from day one. This is a cumbersome challenge, to say the least, which is why companies have been increasingly implementing DevOps into their development environment.
As the acronym might imply, DevOps is a set of integrated practices that combines software development with IT operations and facilitates a more productive, rewarding, and ultimately more successful development process as a whole. This system focuses on every key aspect of this process, including design, development, integration, deployment, testing, and the final release of the product. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ways DevOps can speed up software development in your company and the tools you can use to make it work.
Build a culture of productivity and progress
One of the key pain-points of software development teams and operations managers that hinders collaboration and progress is the lack of team culture. It’s important to note that DevOps is not a tool, rather, this is a philosophy and a comprehensive system that employs various solutions to reach project goals, which includes the creation of a positive culture within the key teams tasked with the development and release of the product. DevOps aims to kick-start productivity by setting a healthy foundation for everyone involved.
The goal here is to create a collaborative work environment, which is why DevOps builds this culture on the pillars of continuous communication, honesty and transparency, accountability, and by educating all team members on proper workflow management, feedback, monitoring and reporting, and much more. Initially, it will take some time and effort to set these pillars into place, but soon enough you will start to notice the positive changes taking place in both the development and operations team.
Enhance cross-department collaboration
Another key pillar of the DevOps approach is ensuring seamless cross-department collaboration, and emphasizing the importance of continuous feedback from all teams that might have any touch points with the project. This is achieved through education and training workshops, where employees can get acquainted with the processes taking place in other departments, which will allow them to understand how collaborating can make every department more productive and ultimately help build a better product.
However, it’s not just about telling people why they need to collaborate, it’s also about implementing the tools necessary to make collaboration seamless and to cut waste across the board. DevOps is primarily a cloud-based solution, which allows all employees to work together on a centralized platform and communicate in real time, making the entire project more transparent and easier to understands for everyone involved. This also makes performance monitoring that much easier.
Make incremental daily progress
One of the most important elements of a productive development process is having the ability, talent, and expertise necessary to make daily incremental progress. This is crucial if you are to preserve the momentum of the project, prevent delays and downtime, and just keep the process going without a hitch. Of course, this is also something that experienced DevOps specialists emphasize in their strategies and in every project, because they understand just how important it is to keep pushing the project forward no matter what.
Unfortunately, this is an area where most companies fall short, and the project invariably suffers as a result. In startups and very small dev teams, there is usually a lack of key talent necessary to make these small improvements on a daily basis, which is why implementing DevOps and utilizing the talent it has to offer is so important for the survival of the product.
Leverage technology to boost automation
DevOps relies on automation in a very big way. Now that technology has weaved itself into every industry, department, and process in the modern workplace, business leaders are finally able to automate repetitive tasks in order to cut extraneous expenses, reduce the overall workload, and allow their employees to focus on the tasks that truly matter. Given the fact that DevOps is all about automating menial tasks, you can see how your teams can benefit from its integration.
Monitor performance and optimize quickly
And finally, if you are to roll out an app or any piece of software without disappointing your customers, you have to monitor the performance of your teams, constantly test the product, and optimize it quickly so that the development process doesn’t suffer. DevOps allows for easy, intuitive, and real-time monitoring of all key processes in the development cycle, and helps spot risks and problems ahead of time. This allows you to not only cut the time to market, but also to roll out a bug-free product that performs as promised.
Wrapping up
In the end, there doesn’t seem to be a single process that DevOps can’t upgrade and improve in the development cycle. Implementing the DevOps solution will drastically speed up software development and allow you to deliver a top-quality product to your customers.
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