DevOps practices include Continuous Integration (CI), deployment, monitoring and more. They improve developer productivity and help find and address bugs faster.

With DevOps, teams can respond quickly to customer needs with higher product release speeds. They can also add new features to their products with fewer defects and less manual effort.

Planning

A successful DevOps implementation requires a new delivery system that aligns teams and increases the speed of development while also increasing solution quality and security. This system is called a software factory, and it comprises a set of tools and processes that help teams develop, test, and deploy specialized digital products rapidly and effectively.

It includes a continuous build and testing pipeline, and it supports agile methodologies by allowing teams to break work into small increments and track progress with metrics. It also supports collaboration and communication across teams to create transparency and remove constraints.

The most effective way to improve your DevOps practices is through a continuous evaluation and optimization process. This allows you to identify roadblocks and gaps that affect KPIs, such as a manual step that takes too long or a tool that doesn’t have the necessary integration capabilities. This way, you can develop a plan to tackle the issues and ensure that your team is always on the right track. In addition, it’s important to invest in a DevOps training program to keep up with the latest technologies and best practices.

Development

It’s important that development teams can develop software quickly and effectively, but it’s equally important that the code is secure. DevOps teams use automation, a culture of collaboration, blameless post-mortems and other best practices to ensure that the work passes inspection at every stage, from planning through deployment and into live production.

Teams that adopt DevOps release updates faster and with fewer errors. This helps them meet customer needs more rapidly and keep up with competitors. But it requires a new way of working that breaks down traditional barriers between developers and IT operations teams.

It starts with a pilot project that defines an approach and basic processes. Then it focuses on building capability across teams. This might include training, sharing best practices and evaluating and optimizing tools. For example, the team may replace a collection of disparate tools with a single pipeline that enables code to move through each step in the process automatically. This can reduce the time required for review and approval, as well as improve tool connectivity and security. It also enables the team to use microservices, which break down an application into individual components that can be deployed and run independently.

Testing

A DevOps team uses continuous delivery and automated processes to reduce development time. In turn, the company can respond to customer needs and increase product quality. Unlike traditional structures that keep developers and operations teams separate, DevOps allows both teams to collaborate and share information. This helps to break down communication barriers and speed up the product release process.

In DevOps, software is rolled out to production in small increments and tested in live environments, which helps improve its quality. This helps reduce downtime and costs by minimizing defects. It also makes it easier to identify and repair problems. DevOps teams avoid the “It worked on my machine” response and focus instead on finding ways to fix production issues quickly.

Having access to knowledge is a core DevOps practice, and documentation can help teams share information efficiently. Documentation tasks should be included on the team’s backlog, and teams should treat docs as first-class citizens so that they’re always up to date. Without these practices, teams can lose track of what they’re doing and may find themselves scrambling to catch up when the person who knows how to do something goes on vacation or leaves the company.

Deployment

DevOps deployment practices include gradual changes, automation, and continuous feedback. Ideally, team members collaborate closely throughout the process, using tools for code editing, planning and communication that are secure and accessible to everyone.

Using a tool like GitLab or JetBrains Space, for example, allows teams to centralize their plans and documents in one place where they can be easily shared and edited. Visual whiteboard tools are also a good choice for creating and sharing roadmaps and brainstorming with the team.

The goal is to release software to users as quickly and safely as possible. This is often achieved through the use of a progressive exposure model. As a new feature proves its stability in production, it can be gradually exposed to more users until the majority of your audience is using it. This helps to minimize the impact of bugs that may have slipped through quality gates. Alternatively, engineers can deploy a new feature in parallel with the existing version through shadow or A/B testing. This technique allows engineers to monitor performance and check for stability issues without affecting the entire user base.

Operations

DevOps requires multidisciplinary teams to collaborate toward a unified aim or set of goals. This involves reorganizing software development, IT operations and quality assurance into a single workflow with shared accountability and a focus on customer value.

These teams must also rely on a comprehensive continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, automation that reduces manual work, and a centralized repository for code changes and testing. DevOps also promotes agile project management tools that support the rapid iterations of coding projects, and the use of continuous feedback and measurement to accelerate processes.

Another practice enabling DevOps is infrastructure as code, which treats the configuration of software-based resources like servers as actual code that can be tested and deployed in a consistent way. This enables rapid and consistent deployments, and ensures that the environment matches the design of the software. This also helps to prevent bugs or misconfigurations that could cause production failures and a negative user experience. Finally, a full stack observability platform like Atatus can help teams understand why errors occur, rather than having to depend on screenshots and log dumps.