Digital Transformation is a necessity for companies that want to remain competitive in the global market. As technology advances rapidly, the ability to adapt and innovate is essential for long-term success. One of the key elements for this transformation is the DevOps culture, which revolutionizes the way development and operations teams collaborate, bringing agility, efficiency, and innovation to all sectors of the organization.
Shift Left and Continuous Quality
Let’s imagine a technology company developing a new innovative application. In the traditional model, the development team works hard for months to create the software, while the operations team waits to deploy the finished product. This separation of functions often results in long delivery cycles, communication failures, and deployment issues. The frustration is high, and the costs are too.
The DevOps culture proposes a different approach, uniting development and operations from the beginning of the project. By adopting DevOps practices, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD), companies can drastically reduce delivery time and increase software quality.
This is where the Shift Left concept comes in, which focuses on moving tasks as early as possible in the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) process, improving quality and reducing costs. Therefore, it is highly advantageous to have proper testing from the beginning of development, especially if they are automated.
The termContinuous Quality, coined by Microsoft Learning, is a crucial approach that is important to understand why it’s necessary to Shift Left. For example, in the requirements and design definition, the cost of fixing in production is 30 times more expensive than when identified early.
You can learn more about Continuous Quality here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/explain-devops-continous-delivery-quality/3-explore-continuous-quality
In another example, a study by the IBM System Science Institute from 2010 shows that the relative cost of fixing defects after code release is 100 times more expensive! If you work with technology and know that operational efficiency is what makes your business sustainable, then you understand that you need to focus on the problems.
You can find the full study here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255965523_Integrating_Software_Assurance_into_the_Software_Development_Life_Cycle_SDLC
CI/CD Pipelines, Incidents, and Processes
Although your organization utilizes CI/CD pipelines, you still may run into problems after deployment in the production environment. When this happens processes and blockages will inevitably increase, despite efforts to reduce problems and the negative impact on customers.
When this happens, you may be inclined to say, “Wow, but everything blows up in the pipeline!” And yes, pipelines were created with the purpose to provide quick and automated feedback so that developers can fix issues early, before releasing the new version to the customer. Therefore, pipelines should not be seen as blockers or additional obstacles; instead they need to be analyzed, understood, and resolved. This also means that, with the addition of new pipelines, now the developer needs to understand more about how their code behaves in the environments.
As a result, processes to address pipelines are extremely necessary and also exist in the SDLC, but overloading them will not bring the expected result, making them progressively slow and extensive. Instead, introduce blameless post mortem meetings to identify the root cause and work on the definitive solution. An effective way to act is using the Pareto Principle, known as the 80/20 rule (addressing 20% of the causes that will achieve 80% of the results). Address recurring cases, and they will gradually reduce.
Back to Basics
There are many Open Source options to assist your organization to carry out this transformation before resorting to buying all the best market tools. It is important to bring your technical staff to the definition table, who know the current ecosystem and can provide their insights on acquiring new tools.
And most importantly, you must first define the architecture of how everything should work before creating them. If Agile methodology brought a way to have smaller deliverables, DevOps will enable automated delivery also in a reduced way. But do not forget the rule: low coupling. A well-defined architecture determines the success of DevOps adoption. If there are small pieces of code with high coupling or a lack of control over interdependencies, the level of complexity will increase considerably, potentially generating great effort and wasting time in reverse engineering analysis in case of incidents.With this, addressing privacy by design is another critical issue, however, that topic deserves its own article.
Conclusion
Knowing and adopting the DevOps culture is essential not only for technology teams such as analysts and developers, but also for leaders, who must support and foster this transformation. The combination of DevOps and an Agile methodology enhances gains in speed, quality, and security, always with a focus on the customer. Do not miss the opportunity to transform your company and stand out in the market.
To learn more insightful DevOps Principles, you can check out this resource: https://www.dasa.org/about/dasa-devops-principles/