6 compelling business benefits of DevOps

The finding of the ‘State of DevOps’ report shows that the ability to develop and deliver software efficiently and accurately is a key differentiator and value driver for all organizations — for-profit, not-for-profit, educational, and government organizations alike. If an organization wants to deliver value, no matter how they measure it, DevOps is the way to go. 

Another survey on ‘The State of IT Modernization’ by IDG revealed that only 26% of the organizations have completed their initial stages of IT modernization, but they too are seeing significant impact on business operations. The benefits that they are reaping include improved quality of service, better customer experience/satisfaction, cost savings, uptime, and creation of new revenue-generating products and services. 

Why DevOps? 

Brett Hofer, in one of his posts ‘The Art of DevOps: An Introduction to Landscape’, approaches the Art of DevOps as a battlefront, and says – “Ultimately, we’re fighting for the absolute best services and features that we can deliver to our customers as quickly as we possibly can, and to eliminate the “War Room” scenario we are all so familiar with.” Brett pretty much sums up the most compelling business benefits & value that organizations get to leverage in this pithy sentence. 

Let us understand each of the benefits in detail. 

Business benefits of leveraging DevOps 

1. Faster delivery time: The main principles of DevOps – automation, continuous delivery, and quick feedback cycle – aim to make a software development process faster and more efficient. Being an evolutionary stretch of the Agile methodology, DevOps utilizes automation to ensure a smooth flow of the SDLC. By promoting a collaborative culture, it offers the scope for quick and continuous feedback so that any glitches are fixed in time and the releases are done faster. 
2. High collaboration between teams (Business/Dev/Ops): Today, more than ever before, development teams need to break down their inter-departmental silos and collaborate and communicate in a dynamic, round–the–clock environment. DevOps paves the way to improve business agility by providing the much–need atmosphere of mutual collaboration, communication, and integration across globally–distributed teams in an IT organization. The earlier set boundaries based on roles are getting blurred in such an encouraging DevOps environment. All team members, together, are responsible for meeting the quality and timelines of deliverables. 
3. Greater customer experiences: With DevOps, organizations can improve their deployment frequency by 200x, recovery times by 24x, and lower change failure rates by 3x. By automating the delivery pipeline, it becomes possible to ensure the reliability and stability of an application after every new release. When the applications perform flawlessly in production, organizations reap the benefit of greater customer satisfaction. 
4. Early defect detection: The collaborative DevOps environment fosters a culture of knowledge sharing across the teams. The automated, continuous monitoring and continuous testing of the code help improve the overall build quality. Teams are empowered to share their feedback with each other so that the defects are detected early as well as resolved early. 
5. Continuous Release and Deployment: Today’s software development practices require teams to continuously deliver quality software, reduce go-to-market timelines, and adapt shorter release cycles. DevOps enables this through automation. Automated CI/CD pipeline allows the Dev and Ops teams to develop and integrate code almost instantaneously. Further, when QA is embedded and automated, it takes care of the quality part of the code. Thus overall, DevOps promotes better efficiency, higher quality, and faster & continuous releases. 
6. Innovative mindset: DevOps streamlines processes, propagates efficient releases, and ensures quality builds. This means the deployment phases are more relaxed, the teams are better rested, and there is immense scope for bringing an innovative approach for resolving issues. 

A final word 

Chris DeGonia, Director of QA at International SOS, said on a recent podcast – “DevOps is definitely here to stay. It is something that teams really need to get their hands around if they are not already working in DevOps space. They need to scale up or skill up in order to make it. Because it’s not becoming a slower-paced world, we’re certainly facing a faster-paced world as we move forward.” And, for this faster-paced world of the future, organizations cannot expect to stay within their silos, follow the same legacy processes, and then achieve excellence. They need to get up and disrupt themselves – in a good way, with DevOps. Certainly, there is a lot of groundwork required for those starting with DevOps implementation from the scratch. They need to manage the cultural change, establish key metrics, implement automation, and most importantly, integrate Quality Assurance within the SDLC to run parallel to the development. 

While testing is often ignored when it comes to DevOps – it may actually prove to be a major blow to your dream of achieving true success. At Cigniti, we help you realize the gains that DevOps can bring with a proper automated testing framework in place. Integrating automated testing with your DevOps is the best thing to do if you want to save on time and money, while increasing quality and time to market. Schedule a discussion with our experts and understand how we can help you realize the benefits of DevOps with our QA and test automation capabilities.