In our previous article, “Key points about DevOps” we talked about what DevOps is and how it can help you optimize key elements in your company, such as shortening launch times, accelerating the realization of new products and services, and reducing costs. In this article, we will learn more about some good practices to start implementing this as soon as possible.
Doing a brief review, DevOps refers to the words ‘Development’ and ‘Operations’, it is a discipline that, despite being relatively recent, has allowed many companies and organizations to rethink their processes for more efficient and agile ones, managing to increase its competitiveness and efficiency.
Good practices on DevOps
For sure, there are countless benefits to the implementation of this methodology, taking into account that it does not imply an improvement in terms of technology or productivity in itself, but rather it allows to streamline the level of communication and collaboration between departments for optimal execution of operations, time and quality of delivery.
Adopting this new process does not happen overnight, and expected results could be negatively impacted if the company implements ineffectively.
At Huenei, we use this methodology to increase the effectiveness of our software development teams, as well as to improve the quality of the constant deliveries in Custom Software, Mobile Applications, involving it in Testing & QA and UX / UI processes. So we recommend following these practices:
1 – Continuous Integration Process (CPI)
This process is strongly supported by agile methodologies, its principle is to reduce implementation and deployment times, managing to divide a project into more parts, making gradual deliveries.
How this could help? As the team of developers constantly review changes in the repository code, they can more quickly detect any type of flaw and even constantly improve the execution of the operation. It is these early findings in the software life cycle that will help the development department to solve problems almost on the spot (and even prevent them).
2 – Continuous delivery
Arguably, this step accompanies the previous one, as starting with development, build, unit testing, static code analysis, and static analysis security testing in the PCI, it promotes automation of functional tests, integration, performance, and security, along with configuration management and deployment.
As the latter are critical areas for automation, and essential in a DevOps context, it is a type of practice that increases the amount of testing and verification at various stages in manual and automated code cycles.
In addition to allowing a team to build, test and launch the codebase in a faster and more frequent way, which by dividing it into cycles of smaller size and duration, speeds up the processes of organizations, allowing them to carry out more launches, reduce manual deployments and reduce the risks of production failures.
3 – Communication management
A key element in DevOps management, since its focus is on keeping all interested parties related to development, operation, and implementation informed, taking into account that we are integrating the tasks of different departments. Therefore, communication is essential and becomes a fundamental element for a total adoption, keeping everyone on the same page to involve them in the whole process, keep up to date with the organization and avoid doubts between them or the final products.
To apply the strategy correctly, it is vital to keep all the teams and members up to date, in this way it is guaranteed that the leaders of the organization (from the sales, production, and management departments) can be involved in the processes and guide the team development to make successful changes, from their perspectives and knowledge.
4 – Test automation
In software development, regular testing is essential to create quality code, which is vital to implement in a DevOps management, not only because it saves time by quickly completing tedious and time-consuming tasks, but also because it allows you to identify quickly early failures in pre-deployment processes.
This in itself is the core of agility and innovation, since the additional time that team members will have can be invested in tasks with greater added value or in monitoring the results of new processes, identifying failures and opportunities for improvement.
5 – Continuous monitoring
Like all cultural and work process changes, this requires close and continuous monitoring to anticipate and identify that all actions are being carried out correctly and that performance is as expected.
Continuous delivery of feedback from all members of the organization in real-time is vital to the organization; from the production team that runs the application to the end customer at the official launch stage. In this way, we ensure that the developer can benefit from all the valuable feedback on the end-user experience in the process and in turn, modify the code to meet the expectations of the end-user.
Conclusions
With an ever-evolving business environment and an ever-improving and growing technology landscape, organizations must seek to stay ahead, with DevOps they can increase the speed and quality of software implementations by improving communication and collaboration between parties. interested.
In themselves, these good practices allow creating a clear guide to guide any company, of any size and industry, to immerse themselves in the necessary cultural change, managing to increase productivity and efficiency through high-quality deliveries, adding transparency to their processes. and open collaboration across development and operations teams.
Know more about our process in the Software Development section.