Why Should Anyone Join The DevOps Movement

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DevOps movement is really picking up momentum. Many conferences, blogs, mailing lists these days are talking about how and why this transformation is eventually inevitable. Organizations today are convinced that these are paradigm shifts where Sysadmins and developers need to start working together, train each other, and ultimately blur the boundary between them. The prevailing challenge is that Sysadmins get the software live, but often have least interactions with developers, sometimes nil, diminishing the expectations to deliver good software.

DevOps platform addresses this challenge of software development through innovation, speed, collaboration, and safety – leading towards transformation. With DevOps, it seems obvious that communication is the biggest key where DevOps methodologies act as bridge-builders. Building quality software is really hard as its error prone, risky and unpredictable, which led to pitfalls in the past years. And to say that an application is ‘Dev Complete’ has that extra mile to go before one can call it ‘Live, In Production, Steady, and Revenue Generating’.

Using DevOps and its Tremendous Impact on Business

The DevOps movement needs to be characterized by people with a multidisciplinary skill set – that is, people who are not only comfortable with infrastructure and configuration, but also ready to roll up their sleeves, write tests, debug, and ship features. These people contribute in making DevOps successful as they are efficient in building quick-contacts by creating a comfort zone. They can easily play the role of ambassadors, peace makers, facilitators and communicators and compare ideas discuss and motivate members towards easy adoption of DevOps.

The movement is picking up momentum because with DevOps, technical teams start trying to pull together and create an empowered atmosphere, become more aware of their capabilities, and start supporting all the areas. This makes it easier to track the traditionally problematic areas of deployment and maintenance. The battleground of developers versus sysadmins begin to revamp into a cross-disciplinary approach, thus maximizing reliability in all areas. This transformation brings positive effect on the bottom line with better reliability and availability, faster time to market, happier clients that leaves management with more time to focus the team’s energy towards core business creating a better ROI.

How to get involved?

DevOps is an attitude where most of the software development organizations want to be in, to make a difference to cooperate and communicate. Sysadmins, developers, along with testers, need to be involved for success of the DevOps movement:

• Sysadmins need to spend time with the developers to know their way around the code base. They should start thinking about systems management as a programming task, learn using required tools to manage machines, and think about how to test infrastructure.
• Developers should not view sysadmins as lower life forms, or as people to lob problems to. They should go and join in mingle with them, and start contributing to the code base.
• Experienced programmers should develop an understanding of test driven development, consider mentoring sysadmins to make them confident in programming, and encourage them in taking better ownership of the code base.
• The Management needs to understand that skilful QA team is needed, see if there’s a way to help them, try to cross-pollenate – sysadmins, network people, DBAs, business analysts.

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When to Use DevOps?

• To improve testing capabilities in order to support Agile & DevOps goals
• For frequent deployments to meet their business needs
• To assess current Agile maturity
• To check if current Agile practices are progressing properly towards achieving a DevOps environment
• To implement a successful Agile and DevOps framework

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Benefits of DevOps

1. Ensures faster release cycle
2. Improves ROI
3. Improves collaboration between teams – Business / Dev / Ops
4. Improves transparency for effective decision making

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Cigniti’s Agile and DevOps Advisory services are focused on helping clients identify key areas of improvement, benchmark and align their Agile / DevOps processes to industry best practices, design target operating model to maximize the investments, and provide recommendations and roadmap to establish a high maturity Agile DevOps Organization.  Cigniti’s Advisory Test Services (ATS) Consultants advise using ADEPT® – a comprehensive framework developed using industry best practices and processes like Agile SCRUM & SAFe™ framework, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Testing. This framework enables clients to achieve quick ROI and a scalable model for Agile & DevOps organization.

For further more details about DevOps testing services from Cigniti, log on to www.cigniti.com or mail us to contact@cigniti.com.