Finding ways to make a business more efficient is no easy task. If your business provides software or app development services to the general public, you need to find a way to make this process quick and painless for your clients. One of the best ways to reduce the amount of errors and setbacks that you face during a software or app development projects is by using DevOps methodologies.

What is DevOps?

The IT industry can be categorized at a high level into three main streams of employees, one is generalist, the second is specialist and the third is virtualist. The generalists are the employees who know all the technologies used in their organization at an overview level like an IT support guy or BPO or pre-sales executive. But they don’t know how to code or deeper technical knowledge.
Whereas, a specialist is someone who is an expert in a particular language like Java or Oracle and dive deep into the core technical skills. But unfortunately, in today’s challenging working environment learning one OS or one programming language is not sufficient, this is where a virtualist comes in. DevOps specialist is a virtualist who has extensive and deep knowledge of both operational and developmental skills all in one place.
While the benefits of a DevOps approach are enormous, adopting a DevOps approach is no easy feat. This article outlines DevOps best practices you should follow to optimize your development process.

DevOps Best Practices to Follow

1.Build a collaborative culture

The whole point of DevOps is to improve collaboration and eliminate silos between development, operations, and quality assurance teams. This way, the software can be developed and shipped to customers faster. Achieving this level of collaboration requires a change in the culture and mind-set of the entire engineering team as well as a common goal or set of goals.

In DevOps, development and operations become a part of everyone’s responsibilities irrespective of their specific roles in the team.

2.Improve performance with continuous integration

Enabling and practicing continuous integration can support collaborations between the groups and therefore improve overall performance. Given the diversity of tools and technologies used on a single project, there must be consistency in the integration process, so that teams could share a common mechanism of integrating and validating changes.

3.Automated Acceptance Testing

The implementation of the DevOps practices will most probably entail the adoption of automated testing to support that global change. In the context of DevOps, test automation, in the first place, means an automated infrastructure equipped with the means for continuous code and data quality checking.

4.Use agile project management

In simple terms, an agile methodology acknowledges that requirements and solutions will evolve as you gather customer feedback; it also empowers your team with the ability to adapt and respond to those changes.

While most customers expect new features fast, engineers also need the ability to see how end users are making use of functionality so they can get feedback and iterate on it. By combining DevOps with an agile approach, you can release a small piece of functionality and see how customers respond to it and get their feedback. Instead of spending two quarters to fully develop a feature that ultimately misses the mark, you can iterate on it along the way.

5.Monitor the right metrics

Continuous performance monitoring is a DevOps best practice. The effectiveness of a DevOps approach can only be measured by tracking the right performance metrics, such as lead time, mean time to detect, and issue severity.

Monitoring unit cost as a DevOps metric is a good practice because it helps you build cost-optimized software from the get-go. This is because you get early insight into what your costs are so you can plan your projects and make trade-offs proactively.

6.Proactive Monitoring of the Production Environment

Monitor and communicate across the teams so everyone can see, understand, and affect end results and customer utilization.

7.Understanding DevOps Success Takes Time

Some business owners think that just because a competitor is successfully using DevOps that they can immediately do the same. In reality, it will take a while for you and your team to fully embrace and understand how to utilize the power of this methodology. Making the mistake of going full-tilt with DevOps right away can turn out to be a recipe for disaster.

Concluding Thoughts

DevOps is not easy but it is definitely a change worth making. Besides, you won’t be alone in doing so. Many large enterprises and small to mid-sized organizations have embarked on this transformation and are struggling to do the most out of it.

At the end of the day, the core reason for transforming to a DevOps culture for any organization remains the same, i.e. to deliver high-quality software quicker like never before!

The road to DevOps success will be a long and arduous one, but it is definitely worth the time and energy your team invests.