DevOps Software Development: An Essential Building Block in Your Project

Have you watched any Tom Cruise movies like Top Gun or Days of Thunder? More often than not, the actor has felt the burning need for speed where his top priority was to get a really fast vehicle, ideally faster than the existing ones.

And we notice a striking parallel between his desire and probably the greatest recognized need in the software industry today – the same need for speed.

Every organization strives to stay ahead of its market competitors by creating better products, hopefully at a faster pace. And since software runs almost everything now, it must move faster. To achieve that, you must develop, test, deploy, and improve software quicker than ever before.

This realization has led businesses to embrace DevOps software development.

The primary aim of fostering a DevOps mindset is to bring communication, shared responsibility, and collaboration to the forefront by breaking organizational siloes and deep-rooted hierarchy.

The ultimate result is a faster time to market, reduced technical debt, and minimized lead time – an all-time better development process.

According to Google, the percentage of DevOps teams has been gradually increasing, reporting 16%, 19%, and 22% in 2014, 2015, and 2016 respectively. And for the last three years, it has been steadily around 27%.

In a nutshell, the DevOps culture emphasizes this point– alone, we can do so little, but together, we can do so much.

But what sounds simple in theory might be more challenging in practice. We are here to help you with that.

Keep reading this blog to know how adopting DevOps culture can speed up software development, the roadmap to implement it, benefits, and more.

What is DevOps Software Development Anyway?

Let’s start today’s discussion by first understanding our topic with its definition.

DevOps is a portmanteau combining Development and Operations. It is a set of software project management practices that helps you create a much more efficient and fluid development process.

It’s a cultural shift that establishes collaboration and communication between two teams that intuitively and consciously work together to nurture productivity and efficiency.

In simpler words, your development and operations department will work side by side throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) to build high-quality products. During the process, your operation team will leverage the benefit of many techniques and tools that your developers do and vice versa.

For example, the DevOps culture and mindset enable the operations team to access GitHub and its content repertoires like developers do so that they can also streamline and even automate the process.

To be more precise,

The primary goal of the dedicated software development team is to come up with an idea and create a quality product to cater to the needs of end-users. Their responsibilities include:

• Gathering resources
• Designing
• Developing
• Testing
• Refining product backlog
• Ensuring continuous delivery

On the other hand, the operation team ensures the deployment of a product and manages it throughout the entire lifecycle. And their responsibilities are the following:

• Deployment and maintenance
• Managing security and backup
• Storage and server configuration management
• Renting server space
• Managing outages

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Why Should a Company Invest in DevOps Software Development?

Let’s show you some stats here:

77% of companies have stated that they depend on DevOps to deploy software and planning to do at the earliest.

And 86% of companies feel the need to develop and start the production of new products quickly.

So, your business depends on delivering software in a timely fashion. That software you can use for internal purposes or solving customer needs so that you can empower your people or create a well-ordered delivery chain.

Things run smoothly when the software development life cycle goes as planned. When software delivery gets interrupted and hence slowed down, it can give rise to a domino effect on your end-users and throughout your business.

And when those tailbacks and bottlenecks start to barge on your development process, there can be catastrophic consequences.

Building a DevOps culture comes into play here.

This particular trend has become exceptionally popular for companies around the world to shift from conventional software development to DevOps.

This new approach to software project planning and delivery is viable irrespective of the programming language your developers use, from .NET Core vs Java or PHP vs. C++.

Key Principles of DevOps Software Development

These are the three core DevOps principles that stress changing the work culture for both the development and operations teams:

1. Communication and Collaboration

DevOps methodologies rule out any scope of working in siloes between the development and operations team. As both sides team up and communicate constantly, they are able to provide uninterrupted software integration and delivery.

While the operations team ensures the all-time security and availability of the product, the development team works on delivering user stories.

Hence, if you want to achieve these goals, you need to establish a cross-functional set where the DevOps team will work through the lifecycle. Once things start to fall into place from the beginning, you are likely to face fewer issues in the long run.

2. Shared Responsibility

Above all, DevOps culture principles are about the product dev team working in sync with the ops team. For the development and final deployment of the product, both teams must have a shared responsibility.

The Agile software development team must work closely with the operations team where proactiveness is a crucial attitude. The success of your product is inevitable when the development and operations team understand their roles, share responsibilities, and efficiently co-locate.

3. Product over Project

According to the traditional software development practices, once you complete a task, you pass it on to the next team and step aside.

But, handing over the baton and moving on is not the ultimate goal here; growth is not compatible with completing your assigned task and getting over with it.

Fostering a product mindset instead of a project mindset is the key here. You must take care of the product over changing courses and ensure its success throughout the lifecycle as a team. Building a DevOps culture can empower your team to incline towards the product mindset that will help them manage and streamline the development process.

How Does the Software Lifecycle Works within a DevOps Culture?

The software development life cycle goes through a set of automatic and tunable processes in DevOps. Here we are discussing each process in detail so that you can learn how to make them operation:

Planning

The planning phase is the first step towards creating software. Here, you discuss the overall project requirements, along with the functionalities and features of the software.

From this moment on, those who follow effective DevOps practices start including elements of Agile project management methodology; such as, they create Kanban tools, boards, and a list of tasks to execute for aligning the teams and improving communication.

This is the first move to organize and communicate, which will continue to support your teams throughout the project.

Development

When it comes to executing actual technical tasks, DevOps scales up the value of working by focusing on collaboration and transparent communication. At this step, DevOps will allow your team to run the integrations, tests, and reviews more assuredly.

There is a wide range of DevOps tools for software development that help accelerate production and automate processes without degrading the work quality. All these will lead to a more fluid execution of your project.

As all the development stages become effectively aligned and production speed increases, you can easily launch new releases in less time.

Delivery

Once your software reaches an enforceable, secure, and robust production environment, it’s time for the delivery stage. At this moment, your DevOps team’s responsibility is to approve the product and the solution it provides.

Additionally, processes will have the potential to be scalable at this stage, and you will be able to control them seamlessly as a part of the DevOps culture and mindset.

Operation

At this phase, you will ensure the user experience meets the expectations by continuously monitoring and fixing bugs. As all the previous phases were part of a well-tested and secure development environment, your DevOps team must work proactively here.

Although you might face a number of failures during this phase, remember that failure is just a part of the overall culture so that you can quickly provide efficient returns to end-users. After all, the entire team has actively undertaken the process and completed different stages while exchanging knowledge and information about the software product.

DevOps methodologies essentially work as a structured communicator, enabling system administrators to better grasp the phases of software development and developers to gain more control over the project.

So, if you have a project to develop new or custom software to enhance some functionalities, it will go through a number of phases, and in each of those phases, your team needs to complete a specific task that DevOps software development allows to have more or less time based on the project progress.

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Development Cycles within DevOps Culture

Integrating DevOps in software development practices requires many hours of infrastructure developing, testing, deploying, maintaining, and so on that lead to the final delivery. Once you complete the cycle, you still need to make needed adjustments in the post-launch follow-up phase.

When your team starts adopting a DevOps mindset, both programmers and non-programmers (your operations team) equally participate in the project.

The upshot of working together is shorter and more optimized software lifecycles, faster deployments, and secure deliveries according to the client’s business needs.

In short, building a DevOps culture means your development process can be transparent, developers can have more control over codes, and the operations team can track and monitor product status as they will be able to participate more closely, including giving reviews and feedback.

DevOps Software Development Practices that Accelerate the Software Lifecycle

According to the State of DevOps report, DevOps has helped top-performing IT firms deploy software 30 times more frequently with 200 times shorter lead times. They also manage to recover 168 times faster and face 60 times fewer failures.

If you are still a bit skeptical about embracing the DevOps mindset in your organization, allow us to introduce some important practices those organizations apply in the DevOps methodology. Here are some ways DevOps work:

Automation

You can’t disagree with the fact that automation is the future of the development industry, and it’s considered one of the top software development trends DevOps gives you a much greater chance to integrate automation into your software lifecycle.

Let’s give you an example.

Within a DevOps culture, you will be able to make any change in your repository trigger specific actions. For instance, if your developers make any changes in the code, it will trigger a build. And a successful build will then trigger an automatic deployment of your software.

This means not only your development lifecycle becomes drastically more efficient, but it considerably improves as well. Such use of DevOps automation will go a long way to boost the development, deployment, and maintenance of your software.

CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery)

CI is a method that allows developers to automatically make changes in a code without having to change the core code.

On the other end, CD deploys software in an automated way. It helps in making regular updates with a determined frequency for every new version of the software that is in production.

You can leverage DevOps CI CD services to continuously send codes into production and ensure an ongoing flow of bug fixes and new features.

Improved Builds

Enhanced builds as a result of the collaboration between the dev and ops team is another great advantage of DevOps software development. Although we can give you multiple reasons for it, it mainly boils down to the power of all minds working cohesively in a more productive environment.

So, everything will generally improve if you can successfully implement DevOps; a revolutionary IT culture. Nurturing that kind of collaboration will enable your people to look closely into different grounds like security, performance, reliability, features, reusability, and so on.

To be honest and practical, the development team alone can’t cover that much area. But if you bring them together to work, they can achieve so much more than the two workings separately.

Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as a code enables you to deploy software quickly and reliably with your control over it. It provides the required resources for the software in a manageable and descriptive manner.

This practice offers automation and reduces the risk of human error, leading to a safer and more optimized process.

Besides, you can run configuration management in parallel with this practice as the prior aligns with database, servers, virtual Machines, and system resources.

Version Control

Version control is another benefit that screams the need for DevOps implementation services. It will allow your developers to check history and track revisions of all the changes, the goal being facilitating the analysis and possibly, recovering some part of the code that needs revision.

As the codes in your software merge into the same file, changes become more optimized, and more than one person can work on the code simultaneously.

Time to Market

For stakeholders, faster time to market is perhaps the most exciting advantage of building a DevOps culture. As the development and operations team work together, lead times get shorter, and the time to market of your software speeds up.

Moreover, you can integrate several tasks into your processes like security and QA (which are usually separate processes).

DevOps also reduces the risk of miscommunications that is likely to happen in traditional development methods. Hence, there are very less chances of delay or mistakes in your project.

Agile Software Development

Despite the raging debate on Agile vs DevOps going on for ages in the software industry, Agile-inspired DevOps practices are a progressive approach to development that demands teamwork and the participation of end-users during the whole process.

If your team works with an Agile mindset, their primary focus would be on seeking scopes for improvements and changes to meet expectations and solve problems of your customers/users with the DevOps tech stack.

User Experience (UX)

If your UX team does not work alongside your developers, problems might arise. UX professionals can help you with data that identifies the need of potential design elements in your software for a better user experience.

If your development and operations teams do not work together, the idea may never reach your developers. On top of this, they will evaluate the user experience of your product at the end of the project, which might compel your developers to make internal changes in the code. Needless to say, it can affect the entire codebase.

But DevOps software development can help you avoid such costly hiccups as you integrate your UX team with developers. By doing so, you will not only deliver software faster but make it better-designed and reliable as well.

Continuous Monitoring

This step is of great importance in the software development lifecycle. DevOps teams have full visibility into the performance of your software in real-time. They are able to use alerts for specific situations that prepare them to deal with any kind of complications.

So, continuous monitoring effectively identifies the root causes of recurring software bugs and resolves them as soon as possible.

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Benefits of DevOps Software Development

DevOps brings a plethora of benefits to the table. By 2023, the market size of this software development practice will grow 10.31 billion at a CAGR of 24.7%.

Here we present some tangible benefits of DevOps that will answer why more and more companies are willing to adopt an effective DevOps mindset to develop and deliver software:

1. Customer Value

As CI/CD pipelines get automated, it increases the speed of development and deployment. DevOps practices make sure that you build a running and all-time-available product that solve your users’ problems and prioritize customer value above everything else.

2. Breaking Organizational Siloes

As DevOps emphasizes the collaboration between your dev and ops team, it helps in breaking any existing siloes the teams.

These people constantly communicate and share their responsibilities, including conducting retrospectives and attending Scrum meetings. DevOps teams work as a single, unified unit that ensures operations and development are running side by side.

3. Competitive Advantage

The DevOps culture and mindset enable continuous delivery aligned with the key software quality metrics and KPIs. As a result, you get high-quality software with a positive boost in the deployment speed, helping you to stay ahead of the competitive curve and provide value to your customers.

For example, DevOps has empowered Amazon to deploy a code every 11.7 seconds and Etsy to execute 50 deployments in a day.

4. Improved Core Functionalities

DevOps eliminates the need for manual approval seeking and processing as CI/CD pipelines help you automate major tasks of the development and deployment process.

This allows both the operations and development team have a better focus on their core competencies, i.e., building and releasing high-performance software that does its job in all verticals. With an enhanced focus on their core functionalities, your team can cut off technical debts and lead time.

5. Empowered Teams

More than anything else, DevOps software development facilitates trust among your versatile teams. Each and every individual has an equal contribution to the continuous delivery chain, resulting in a productive and motivated workforce.

This is the beauty of the DevOps methodology – different teams working together across cross-functional structures and providing great opportunities to learn from each other.

Challenges You May Face in DevOps Software Development

Although the values of DevOps are crystal-clear to everyone, companies that are satisfied with their DevOps outcomes are few and far between.

DevOps is definitely a powerful tool, but implementing it in your organization can be difficult for many reasons. That is why only 10% of organizations acknowledge that they have succeeded in developing and deploying software rapidly.

DevOps needs a cultural change and shift across your entire company. And changing an organization’s culture is not that simple to implement. You must influence your culture, encourage it, and give credible evidence so that it can slowly shift.

But don’t worry, these challenges are very common, and you can develop a strategic plan to address these roadblocks.

Here’s an all-inclusive guide to help you identify the challenges in DevOps implementation and solutions.

Why Choose DevOps Software Development for Your Project?

Fostering DevOps practices is the secret sauce for software’ success – merging operations with development.

Implemented right, it can dramatically revolutionize the way your software works and fulfill market demands. The end goal is always to work throughout the software development lifecycle and not complete your job and move on to the next chapter.

Such an organizational change will significantly speed up your process, which can not only satisfy your end users but augment your bottom line as well. And that’s surely a win-win scenario for everyone.

Hence, every modern IT firm should leverage the benefits of a DevOps culture to create high-quality products and fill the gaps between developers and operations experts. And if you are not willing to invest in it, the consequences, in the long run, might cost you more than what you are trying to avoid now.

Wondering where to start? Radixweb’s top-grade DevOps services can help you collaborate smarter, plan better, and deliver faster according to your business needs. React out to our experts to initiate your DevOps journey and leverage the above-mentioned benefits with us!