Ron Wilson
Many people are asking. Why are all these companies embracing DevOps? The reason is simple. Business is demanding faster turnaround on software development projects. Waterfall methods are no longer a viable delivery cycle. DevOps is creating competitive advantages and those who are able to master the approach can gain significant revenue over those who cannot do it well. Speed to market is enhanced with DevOps. It creates a huge win for all that are involved. Technology is becoming increasingly important and is a critical element of any business. With poor technology organizations it is difficult to remain competitive. It used to be that weeks of software cycles would be a significant advantage over those who took months to deploy. That is no longer the case.
The business value that is gained with those organizations who are using DevOps is significant. A survey that was conducted in 2012 by Puppet Labs resulted in the following findings:
- 30x more frequent code deployments
- 8,000x faster code deployment lead time
- 2x change success rate
- 12x faster MTTR
This resulted in greater agility and the repair time was significantly faster. Organizations were producing more work with better outcomes. Can you imagine working in an IT environment where things are significantly more reliable and are being turned around faster? This requires a change in the silo mentality that is so prevalent in IT organizations today. Development organizations within DevOps are spending time helping QA and other downstream teams to increase the value of the entire workstream versus being hands off. These shared cultures foster increased productivity. Things such as non functional requirements become increasingly important since the entire team is worried about quality, scalability, security and operability. When everyone is worried about these things it creates teams that are accountable for the results of the project. Time is critical in these short cycles so things that aren’t adding significant value are discarded because they are a waste of time. Code is deployed multiple times per day in test environments in order to get faster feedback on the code results. This results in code deployments also occurring in production during the day which Operations organizations love because they don’t have to deploy code at nigh or on the weekends. All this is made possible because of DevOps. How can you afford not to do DevOps?
If you would like more information on Agile, DevOps or Software Testing, please visit my Software Testing Blog or my Software Testing YouTube Channel.
