Current Challenges That Can Be Addressed with DevOps

Yes, COVID has thrown workplace culture into fast forward, but it was always coming: the rise of remote work, an increase in burnout, and the need for businesses to be nimble. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to optimize your workplace against the realities of life.

Enter DevOps.

What’s DevOps?

DevOps combines the best practices of high-functioning software development and operations teams.

These best practices typically include process, automation, and collaboration, all of which work together to increase the efficiency and output of your team. Rather than teams working on their own, they work together, in a constant feedback loop where performance is prioritized.

Here are some of the benefits of implementing a DevOps program

• More deployments: More frequent deployments to your software incrementally improve your product on a consistent, predictable basis.
• Reduced risk: Because these improvements are incremental, rather than massive, they are inherently less risky to deploy.
• Reduced cost: Automated testing and continuous integration allow developers to detect bugs and security issues quickly, which lets them spend their time on impactful work.
• Increased collaboration: Rather than working in silos, your team has to work together to ensure business requirements are being met, updates are being tested, and new functionality is being utilized.

So now that we’ve identified the big problem (changing markets) and potential solution (DevOps), let’s discuss on a micro level how DevOps can help solve individual problems of today.

Remote Teams

Remote teams may or may not be new for your organization, but there are some challenges among them, even for the most disciplined teams. When team members are unable to physically see each other and cooperate in real-time, there is the possibility that engagement, collaboration, and productivity will suffer.

To clarify, this doesn’t mean that your remote team will suffer from these issues, but it’s a real possibility, especially if you haven’t thought about strategic processes and programs.

DevOps in a remote environment can help. You can design your infrastructure to support a remote-based work set up and leverage communication tools that track tasks and timelines. Implementing specific processes that are catered to your team can make remote teams even more productive than in-office or mixed teams.

As remote work becomes more and more common, it’s essential to give your employees flexibility while making sure their performance is not sacrificed. Whether you bring your employees back to the office this summer or remain 100% remote, the process you implement now will continue to maximize their happiness and productivity.

Innovation

Right now (and always) consumer needs are changing at warp speed. Software products and teams need to be agile and innovate in real-time in order to keep up with consumer trends and market demands. If you don’t, your competition will start to chip away at your userbase.

Luckily, DevOps can also help your team innovate and implement quickly. A top DevOps principle is automation, which automates your testing and frees up team members to work on strategic, innovative initiatives. Another principle is CI/CD (continuous integration continuous deployment) which ships software improvements in minutes, allowing your team to deliver the best features quickly, with less risk.

All in all, DevOps lets machines take the maintenance so your best employees are solving your consumer’s problems.

Reducing Costs

Developing new features takes time and costs money. However, if those features expand your user base or increase engagement, it’s well worth it.

The problem is, it’s difficult to accurately predict which initiatives will add to your bottom line–and which ones will flop. Before DevOps and agile methodology, this was a massive problem. Companies would build product roadmaps, guess at which improvements would be beneficial, take a gamble, and then cross their fingers.

With agile, there were massive improvements. Teams could iterate small updates more often, test the market, and iterate every few weeks.

DevOps takes agile one step further. Now, optimized DevOps teams are pushing updates multiple times per day, reducing the risk of individual updates and getting immediate feedback on software improvements.

Because there is less risk, there are fewer costs associated with each individual update. And if a bug or error does make it through to the live platform, it is caught quickly, reducing the risk of poor user experience or security breaches.

Get Some DevOps in Your Life

A custom-designed and well-implemented DevOps program can turn your team into a value-creating, cost-reducing machine. The value of optimizing workflows and unleashing productivity can be in the millions for organizations with long and deep product lines.

If you’re interested in seeing what type of costs you could save with a DevOps program, reach out to the team at Devetry. We analyze your team structure, product code, and architecture to create a custom DevOps program, and then assist in implementing it so your team is all on the same page.