When you ask a group of people what DevOps is, you’ll probably get various answers.
Some will speak about automation and tooling, while others will focus on structure and team collaboration. The answers will differ because people in different companies will speak to the benefits of DevOps in their specific organization.
Although every answer is true, ServiceNow DevOps is primarily about aligning development and operations by ensuring they coalesce. At its core, DevOps approaches processes in a way that has developed and operations working alongside one another.
Instead of development handing off code to operations, DevOps has development (devs) and operations (ops) working side-by-side.
More and more organizations are implementing DevOps practices – and for a good reason. Here are four ways it can benefit your business.
1. Renew Focus on Customers
Many organizations adopt DevOps to move away from the long development and release timelines. When software is in development, it’s easy to lose focus of the customer.
Customers are looking for a functional product that solves their problems – and DevOps is the best way to put developers in the customer’s shoes. With DevOps, the focus is on smaller releases, and there is an opportunity for immediate feedback.
2. Unite Your Teams for Faster Product Shipments
With DevOps, other teams (like operations) have the opportunity to share an iterative or agile environment. While development teams have invested in agile for the last decade, operations teams have become isolated and unable to release software as quickly.
DevOps unifies development and operations teams, which supports a faster development timeline – the results are speedier product shipment, giving your organization an advantage over your competitors.
3. Simplify Development Focus
Developing for a release can happen in two ways: you can either have a big release with multiple features in one streamlined app deployment or a quick release with features rolled out one by one.
Big releases usually raise concerns about prioritizing long lists of features that need to be deployed. Drastic changes to this list will need to consider what work has already been done because all the features become enmeshed with one another.
The best way to manage the prioritization of work is to scale back the amount of work done at a given time. The team should address one feature daily or weekly to incorporate developing and releasing into a smooth workflow. Then, if something goes wrong, the team will only have to look at the work done in that timeframe instead of wasting time going through multiple issues.
4. Introduce Automation into the Development Process
The faster, smaller releases that happen more frequently with DevOps can be supported by automation. Incorporating automation into the deployment process can save a lot of time.
Start by automating the routine components of your releases – like writing specifications and testing processes.
However, something to bear in mind is that you shouldn’t build new tools unless you understand why you’re automating a specific step of a process and make sure you know what time-saving benefits the automation will have.
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