How DevOps Principles & Practices Improve Software Quality & Efficiency

DevOps is the fancy name given to a theoretical framework that, if put into proper
practice, brings about a cohesive, seamless functioning of the development and
operations teams of organizations. DevOps needs (and in effect, creates) a culture of
knowledge and information sharing, that leads to collaboration between the various
teams. The practice of DevOps principles not only is beneficial for the performance of
software development and operations, but it also has a very positive impact on the web
service development and quality assurance performance. Disciplined Agile Delivery is an
established process for developing software, and it includes DevOps. DevOps helps to
establish, and achieve an effortless Continuous Delivery process.
DevOps Principles & Practices
Some of the practices that help lay the foundation of a strong DevOps culture are:

Consideration of Perspectives: The cultural change must be considered from the

perspective of both the driver and the participants.
Flexibility: In case of exceptional situations, the organization must be flexible enough
even to temporarily let go of DevOps values.

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Integration Process: A process must be in place to integrate the changes made.

Agile Decision Making: The teams must have the agility to be able to decide the tools
they need to use based on their own skills and expertise.
Transparency: There should be no hidden agenda between the Dev and Ops teams.

A DevOps culture is best defined as a way of open communication, sharing of

responsibility, and mutual respect and trust. If the cooperation between the two teams
is not handled optimally, it will have an adverse impact on productivity, software
quality, and service quality.

Working in a collaborated manner to achieve integration in todays environment where,

say, testing a mobile application requires testing not only the multiple devices from
different manufacturers, but also multiple operating systems, is obviously very
challenging, and requires a different approach.

An established DevOps environment makes both the development and operations

teams become each others customer and supplier. While the Dev team needs the Ops
team to help manage systems for large scale information systems, the Ops team needs
the Development teams assistance in developing tools and apps for the operating
systems, and for implementing features to improve security, performance, and stability.
In essence, this dependency forms the basis on which the bridge of DevOps can be built.

While some perceive DevOps as a job description, others see it a skill set. DevOps
practices can be classified including the concepts of quality assurance, services, and
structures & standards.

The different views of DevOps requires us to look at DevOps from multiple perspectives.
This allows us to unite the conflicting definitions of DevOps under separate names, such
as DevOps as a role in the SDLC process, DevOps as a skill set and DevOps as a
conceptual framework for supporting development and operations of Information
Systems.

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Once a proper DevOps environment has been established, it makes significant

contributions to the growth of an organization.

Contributions to Quality Assurance (QA)

DevOps can make a significant contribution in the area of QA in Information Systems

that links the development, operations, and customer support teams with the
customers. QA is usually hard to predict and DevOps improves the QA process by
bringing the aforementioned parties closer through cooperation and tooling. DevOps
also provides more opportunities to gather more data today as compared to the past.
To have a greater impact, the responsibility of providing QA can be assigned to
employees who perform both development and operations tasks. By using behavior
driven operations (BDOps), the different roles around QA can specify how the system
must deliver the desired UX.

Contributions to Services

DevOps principles also prove beneficial in the service management frameworks (SMF) as
services rely more and more on cooperation between Dev and Ops personnel. The
integration of development and operations activities forces organizations to reassess
their business models. Organizations at times need to assess their business models to
use Service-based models as Software as a Service (SaaS), and as DevOps has certain
competitive advantages, it adds a lot of value as an integral part of the new model.

Additionally, resources which in the past were owned by companies are today offered
as services such as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). As
services heavily rely on seamless cooperation between the Dev and Ops teams,
supporting DevOps principles in the SMF is beneficial.

Contributions to the Information System Development

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DevOps is a major change in Information System development. DevOps reduces the gap
between developers, operations and the end user, allowing for earlier problem
detection. In the past, after each Scrum sprint software would work according to
specifications, but these would not be validated by the actual end user. With DevOps,
we can implement continuous development and release software to the end user
frequently. DevOps also allows developers and operations to work together more
efficiently and effectively.

How does DevOps Benefit

In terms of supporting a culture of collaboration:

By hiring people with skills in both development and operations, create a culture
that nurtures collaboration
By looking beyond the boundaries of departments and teams, bring about a
positive change in the entire environment
By encouraging cooperation between teams, people become empowered and
feel more trusted and act more responsibly.

In terms of supporting automation:

By providing an overview of the software development pipeline, DevOps helps

gain perspectives from both engineering and business angles.
By helping implement continuous delivery, DevOps helps release software on
demand.
By exploring and adopting patterns and tools that support automation.

In terms of facilitating sharing:

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 By facilitating communication between the Dev and Ops teams to improve

understanding.
By creating shared knowledge management systems creates an atmosphere of
centralized information.

In terms of the usage of services:

By propagating use of cloud services in your products that will simplify your
network infrastructure.
By making services as version control accessible for both Dev and Ops.
By suggesting changes to your business model as required.

In terms of facilitating quality assurance:

By involving QA during the transition process.

By making QA a stakeholder when considering reporting.
By using Realtime User Monitoring to detect problems early.

In terms of solving problems considering structures & standards:

By setting up a centralized system during the transition to DevOps.

By considering inputs from both Dev and Ops teams equally.
By suggesting use of standards such as CMMI and ITIL.
By helping implement established enterprise processes such as Disciplined Agile
Delivery.

DevOps practices thus help if you want to save on time and money, while increasing
quality and time to market. Yes, its true that you may have to spend time and resources
to setup automation. But done with the right partner and weighing the cost and
benefits, this will be an investment for which you wont regret. Click here to know more
about Gallops DevOps expertise.

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Reference:
Report by Floris Erich, Chintan Amrit, Maya Daneva on DevOps Literature Review,
University of Twente

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