With technology playing the disruptor across industry, products and processes that we used in the past, no longer fits in the solution framework for the future. Organizations are looking for a new, faster and innovative service delivery structure to serve their customers.
One of the most powerful trends observed in the recent years is increasing adoption of Agile and DevOps practices. DevOps is aimed at increasing collaboration and cooperation among different functions of an organization to deliver faster, better, reliable and high-quality software solutions.
HARMAN support DevOps culture and defines 4 essential pillars that will help you to map out a DevOps journey for your company.
DevOps Culture and Mindset:
DevOps isn’t just another software development methodology. It is a culture; an intersection of people, products and processes to develop a performance-driven team structure. It isn’t for specific people or team, but for everyone who is involved in delivering value to end users.
For DevOps to create an effective and seamless collaboration, the entire organization needs to embrace the mindset and culture of DevOps.
There are certain ways which can help you imbibe DevOps culture within your organization.
- Now that the teams (developers, QAs, operations) are working together, each group needs to trust other to get quality code delivered on time
- Acknowledge the idea within teams and work together to come up with creative solutions
- Avoid blaming individuals and make team members realize the brunt of their mistakes
- Setting up a DevOps cadence in advance
- Educate the team on implications of not following the process
For successful adoption and transition to DevOps, one needs massive business transformation initiatives along with transparent communication across teams to ensure proper alignment. Such DevOps practices will help organizations to provide faster, stable and continuous deliveries to survive dynamic market conditions.
Adapting Microservices:
Organizations have been using monolithic architecture for long now. Monolithic architecture is like your big container that has all the business services tightly assembled and coupled together in a single unit.
Due to its tight packaging of software applications in a single unit, the deployment of services becomes difficult because even if a small component in the application needs a change, the whole application needs to be re-packaged and re-assembled. It leads to high cost, reduced agility and scalability.
But, with time, companies realized the importance of microservices over monolithic architecture. Organizations started looking microservices as an enabler of faster and agile application delivery. Microservices architecture breaks down massive software projects into smaller, independent modules which are then defined for specific tasks which can communicate with each other through simple APIs.
Microservices gave the concept of ‘fail fast and fix faster’. With microservices, parts of applications with errors can be rectified independently and can be deployed easily and separately without touching the entire application. Smaller codebases can be easily maintained by smaller teams which result in increased agility, scalability and reliability. Thus, microservices make the organization nimble and agile in their development efforts by improving the uptime and speed of execution.
Building Quality-driven Mindset:
An organization needs to maintain synergy between quality and speed for the successful business delivery.
Quality assurance in DevOps organization is not limited to finding bugs but to prevent them from arising in the first place. Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) in DevOps culture requires rapid software development followed by continuous testing, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring. In such a process, manual testing has to be simply ruled out and test automation has to be deployed.
Automating the deployment process in DevOps environment leads to faster time to market, higher quality software solution and increased organizational effectiveness.
DevOps practices accelerate the process of software delivery using Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) which allow business units to collaborate and function faster.
Few more important methods for Quality improvement are:
- Developing a Quality Improvement Plan based on customer feedback and internal defects
- UI, API, UT should be made part of Sprint development process so that automation becomes an integral part of delivery which would otherwise lead to rise of technical debt
- Address the technical debt incrementally (first by removing blockers then by performing code refactoring wherever possible and lastly by resolving critical issues)
- Design & develop quality gates (UT >=90%, Code Complexity <=15, Code duplication <=5%) and strictly adhere to it
- Infuse code checks (SonarQube, PCLint, KlockWorks, Coverity, Fortify etc.)
Tools and Automation:
As companies are rushing to take their software early-to-the-market, the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) is going through a paradigm shift. In the DevOps environment, you need to maintain a continuous feedback system and with a lot of information moving back and forth, logging everything becomes critical.
Therefore, integrating a tool system that lets you collaborate across development, testing and deployment would save a considerable amount of time which otherwise would take days during the DevOps implementation.
Tool selection is also important as it should reflect and adhere to a common set of business objectives while providing seamless collaboration and integration between tools.
Tools can be used to capture request and feedback. They can be integrated with survey platforms and can provide customer feedback while social media platforms can be integrated to provide the team with real-time feedback. It can later help in optimizing the products and spotting the gaps, issues and inefficiencies among the team.
In DevOps environment, deploying the right set of tools to the right users isn’t enough. A suitable connectivity between the DevOps tools is imperative to create a collaborative work environment among the team.
Successful DevOps requires a symbiotic blend of culture, tools and methods. These pillars will allow organizations to achieve a 360-degree view on how to build a DevOps strategy for their business to function faster and reduce risk during SDLC through automation or shorter development iterations. If you want to know more about HARMAN’s DevOps and Agile Services, drop us a note here.
