Businesses across the globe have taken a valuable step towards digital transformation through the adoption of DevOps. It inarguably caused a major shift in IT culture over the past decade. But does DevOps have more to it than the usual “Development” + “Operations”?
A term widely misunderstood by most people, DevOps is, in reality, an umbrella term. DevOps can be defined as a tool, a mindset shift, a methodology, or a mixture of all these three and more! To sum it up, DevOps is a collection of tools and more importantly, ideologies that aim to increase user productivity, optimize software delivery, and improve organizational performance – technically and culturally.
Now that we have a brief idea of the concept of DevOps, let’s deep dive into the DevOps adoption wave.
Understanding DevOps and what makes it extra popular
DevOps, in simpler terms, is a continuous process that focuses on improving the existing software lifecycle, team enhancement, and better collaboration using its tools or principles. DevOps aims to combine the workings of the developers’ team and the operations team, as a sustainable continual process.
But, what made DevOps the chosen one? Here are a few of the noteworthy reasons:
- The software industry has always been on the edge to constantly deliver products with agility and reduce the time-to-market. And this is when shifting their existing software development methodologies to DevOps resulted in a positive push in the right direction.
- DevOps is more practical compared to its counterparts, thereby teams could seamlessly transition and instill DevOps into their daily work, with a slight bit of training of course.
- Adopting DevOps caused shorter delivery cycles and rapid improvements due to the collaboration of the operations and development teams. This unique ability of the DevOps model spread the word fast causing more and more companies to embrace it.
- DevOps gave rise to increased innovative ideas, faster completion of targeted deployments, and an overall improvement in product quality. Also, there was always room for more and more automation of tedious everyday tasks.
Summing up the above benefits lead software companies to reduce their costs significantly. Through the implementation of DevOps 50% of companies over the last two years have reportedly reduced expenditure and increased their ROI.
Here’s a question that needs addressing – does DevOps have more to it than its usual tools and methods? The answer is yes!
The DevOps Mindset – Is it more than a tool?
Implementing DevOps is to execute major shifts within the organization – mindset, cultural and technology shifts. DevOps aims to tackle the divide that usually exists between the development team and the operations team, by allowing them to constantly communicate and innovate at a faster pace.
DevOps employs a set of no-nonsense principles that motivate teams to own up the entire process of software development, from start to finish. Teaming up this way leverages delivery, provides continuous system monitoring, and allows for shared resources.
The 5 essential elements that make up the DevOps mindset:
#1. Encouraging learning and continuous improvement of processes
The main goal of a software organization should be to enable a continuous learning and innovation cycle for its employees. Rather than concentrating on deployments alone, incremental learning ultimately leads to better productivity and accelerates innovation.
Apart from this, the quality of the existing processes needs constant improvement too for satisfied customers. This is exactly why DevOps has to be viewed as a mindset rather than just a set of tools, where the entire organization constantly works towards continuous learning and growth.
#2. Transitioning from silos to team effort
In business terminology, silos refer to teams working independently towards their individual deliverables and do not share resources, quite contrary to DevOps.
“Teamwork makes the dream work” is quite applicable here. DevOps encourages teams to constantly communicate, collaborate better, exchange ideas, innovate together and work towards the end goal – delivering an impeccable product.
#3. Focusing on customer feedback
For a promising DevOps transformation, having a “customer-specific” mindset is quite crucial. It doesn’t come off as a surprise that in today’s time, system improvements based on customer feedback play a larger role than adding new features mindlessly.
Teams need to prioritize the customers and their timely feedback to constantly improve processes and understand their needs. Nobody would wish to waste their efforts developing features with no real-time users, would they?
#4. Accepting and learning from failures
Any sudden cultural or mindset shift within an organization is prone to fail at a point or two after transitioning. Therefore, after adopting DevOps, companies need to understand that the quote “Learn from your failures and never give up” is indeed true.
DevOps is not a one-size-fits-all model. And since every organization is unique, they need to constantly work towards analyzing what worked and what didn’t. Companies need to encourage teams to learn from their mishaps and continually adapt to the new environment.
#5. Increased transparency, delivery speed, and automation
DevOps makes way for shorter deployment cycles and combining it with teams that are continually working towards changes results in faster delivery of software. Thanks to better collaboration, DevOps increases transparency among peers leading to an end-product matching up to customer standards.
And more the automation the better for DevOps, since automating manual processes increases the team’s overall efficiency. Automation allows the teams to work more on action-oriented tasks rather than time-consuming activities.
The Bottom Line
Mindset is a continuous approach and needs constant effort. For companies to successfully adopt and transform through DevOps, the old-fashioned ways of working have to be demolished. The pillars of DevOps – the people, culture, and technology need to create strong mindsets by working towards making the DevOps adoption a success story.
Wondering if DevOps could largely benefit your company too? Get in touch with us today for a complete process walkthrough.
