Approach, Benefits, and Best Practices of DevOps Transformation

Many businesses strive to enhance their delivery methods to lift the bar even higher. Having a DevOps mindset is critical to accelerating releases and improving development quality. The DevOps transformation has changed how IT departments work, bringing teams together without wasting time or effort to move forward. 

Starting DevOps transformation in 2023 will allow companies to optimize resources, accelerate software delivery and effectively meet market needs. So, let’s learn how to redefine how software solutions are built, tested, deployed, and supported.

Understanding DevOps transformation

Before we map out the DevOps transformation roadmap, let’s understand the essence of DevOps transformation as a process. DevOps transformation can be defined as a shift to an Agile-inspired approach that bridges the gap between development and operations teams, enables them to collaborate more closely, shortens the system development life cycle, and ensures the continuous delivery of high-quality software.

According to this definition, transforming DevOps requires using DevOps automation tools and simultaneously redefining both the software development toolkit and the development culture. The latter, in turn, must be aligned with the core principles of DevOps: collaboration, data-driven, and customer-centric decision-making, continuous feedback and improvement, shared responsibility, and automation. 

Key benefits of DevOps transformation

99% of companies surveyed by Atlassian admit that DevOps transformation positively impacts their organizations. Below are the top benefits they reported. 

Better quality results

DevOps is a strategy that helps you get better quality results faster. It relies heavily on data to help prioritize the most vital aspects for the product owner and end users. Addressing the first enables businesses to improve the quality of the products they deliver from cycle to cycle. 

Accelerated time to market

DevOps reduces time to market by automating testing, increasing team productivity, avoiding time-consuming and routine tasks, and significantly reducing the likelihood of error. With a thoughtful DevOps transformation strategy, you can get work done faster by aligning the needs of developers with the needs of the IT operations team. In addition, you can improve team productivity by providing visibility into how long tasks take, so you can better align resources with needs.

Improved Deployment Frequency

One of the pillars of DevOps methodology is continuous deployment, which allows technical teams to adapt more quickly to changing market demands by adding new features virtually on the fly. In addition, the quality of each new piece of the software remains high through automated testing, improved collaboration, and continuous feedback. 

Better team culture and improved collaboration

Transforming DevOps is about improving the organization’s culture and optimizing collaboration between development and operations teams. It encourages the exchange of ideas and frequent communication. From this perspective, DevOps transformation aims to create a more agile team that can respond quickly to business requirements. 

Faster recovery time

Another significant benefit of the DevOps transformation is speeding up releases and recovery time in the event of problems. DevOps as a technique also helps to review mistakes as a learning opportunity and search for solutions to avoid future failures for the same reasons.

Creating better products and services

Short product development cycles and regular input from product owners, stakeholders, and consumers are key components of the DevOps strategy. Starting the next process with first-hand feedback allows you to create products and services that are fully aligned with business goals and customer expectations. 

Lower failure rates for new releases and fewer incidents

Because the DevOps methodology creates a more collaborative environment between the development and testing teams, the likelihood of missing a critical bug becomes much lower. 

The best practices for DevOps transformation

DevOps transformation leads to impressive benefits that are worth starting building your DevOps implementation roadmap now.

Maximize the use of automation tools and technologies

Process automation is the primary driver of DevOps. While you can’t automate everything, there are critical processes that should be automated:

• Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). 
• Automating the CI/CD pipeline is a way to reduce time to market, reduce the risk of problems, and improve overall efficiency. 
• Resource provisioning. Automated provisioning provides instances on demand, allocating only the needed computing resources. 
• Application deployment. Automated application deployment accelerates software delivery from the test environment to the production environment. 
• Software testing. Running automated test scripts is an opportunity to find hard-to-find bugs with fewer resources. 
• Log management. The purpose of automated logging is to make it easier to identify and resolve bugs. 

Ongoing DevOps performance measurement

DevOps is a data-driven practice, and that’s one of the features that makes it effective. Automation tools, including DevOps performance tracking, make collecting and analyzing data easy. 

Agile project management model

 Agile project management and DevOps are a perfect combination. They advocate flexibility, team-customer collaboration, transparent and frequent communication, and rapid response to change. 

Focus on constant feedback

Fortunately, Agile-style project management facilitates effective communication between the development and testing teams. This allows the product owner to track the development process, receive progress reports, meet with their teams online, keep them informed, and share their concerns. 

Implementing DevOps transformation 

The right tools used by highly skilled DevOps professionals, support from management, and clearly defined KPIs are the foundation of DevOps transformation.

• Define clear short-term goals and make a plan.
•  Start by determining the structure and size of the group.
• Define roles and responsibilities, and hire DevOps engineers and allied professionals. 

Typically, a cross-functional DevOps team consists of a software developer/tester, an automation engineer, a quality assurance (QA) specialist, a security engineer, and a release manager. 

Conduct an IT infrastructure audit and assessment

The next step on the road to DevOps transformation is to conduct an IT infrastructure audit. Its purpose is to determine how IT systems function and identify their weaknesses. When preparing for DevOps transformation, an IT infrastructure audit’s goal is to determine whether the existing system can implement DevOps and what points are missing in it. In this case, the key objectives of an infrastructure audit are to review standards and procedures, verify system performance and security, look for legacies, and report on audit results. 

Build a DevOps Center of Excellence (CoE)

A DevOps Center of Excellence (CoE) is a framework that encompasses the standards, procedures, and practices that your cross-functional team will follow during development, testing, deployment, and production. Creating a DevOps CoE includes the following:

• Assembling a team of experts with cross-functional knowledge.
• Creating a knowledge and training center.
• Defining a toolkit.
• Focusing on automation solutions. 

Establish, track, and evaluate KPIs

You can track many DevOps practices, such as deployment frequency, change volume, discovery time, average recovery time, runtime, defect frequency and volume, etc. Before starting your DevOps transformation journey, make sure you track the most important KPIs directly related to your DevOps transformation goals. 

Improve test automation and QA coordination

Once you’ve completed your IT audit and established the proper KPIs, ensure a QA coordination process is in place. This person’s main responsibility is to ensure that the company’s QA processes and standards are followed. In addition, the QA coordinator ensures that the company’s products and services meet industry-accepted quality standards. 

Launch of pilot programs

A pilot program is a trial run of a new process or system to evaluate its effectiveness and identify potential problems before it is implemented on a larger scale. Running pilot programs to test the effectiveness of your DevOps strategy is one of the wisest approaches, inspired mainly by lean development methodology. 

Find a technical or implementation partner

While the basic idea of DevOps is simple to understand, transforming DevOps requires deep technical knowledge, skills, and the right tools. Partnering with a DevOps transformation service provider makes it easier and cheaper to access. With the support of a technical company, you can make your DevOps transformation journey smooth and pitfall-free with their hands-on experience and expertise. 

Take the first step to DevOps transformation with Bragona Technologies.

By starting your DevOps transformation now, you can cut costs, speed up your development process, avoid costly bugs, and deliver higher-quality software, especially if considering outsourcing DevOps-as-a-service.