How to Adopt a Successful DevOps Culture

Understanding and identifying an optimal approach to enable coordination and rapidly deliver assistance to consumers—without jeopardizing quality—remains to be one of the most significant challenges in almost every industry.

This has led to the inevitable rise in DevOps adoption, as this enables companies to significantly stimulate software releases while still ensuring applications reach quality objectives. Hence, many companies have adopted or are looking to adopt a DevOps culture. 

However, DevOps can’t be purchased, registered, or declared. If you’re thinking of a move to a DevOps distribution model, here are six approaches for assuring a flourishing DevOps adoption in your organization.

Embrace the Right Mindset 

DevOps doesn’t start by just saying, “let’s adopt DevOps,” and leaping in with the tools. Your whole business needs to have a proper understanding of what DevOps is and what particular business demands it can address. Most importantly, everyone should be ready for change and to the new business practices that will be incorporated. 

One method to start this process is to recognize your current application value streams—the range of actions required for transferring your products from development into making. 

You must identify the limitations and bottlenecks that are likely to arise during the delivery procedure. This will help you to analyze which areas need improvement. Moreover, while thinking of future products, you must also analyze your current delivery procedure to identify what’s working and what’s not to make relevant changes wherever required. 

However, to do so, you need to be ready to experiment. Short-term mishaps are tolerable, as long as you’re understanding from it and developing. Instead of simply following ineffective processes as they’ve been followed by everyone, you must ask important questions like: 

  • Why do we perform this specific process? 
  • What value does it add to the business?
  • Is there a better way to accomplish the end goal?
  • Is there any scope of improvement in the current process? 

Lastly, you need to give priority to collaboration and interaction. DevOps is often associated with industrialization, however, while this can help stimulate manual processes, DevOps makes use of communication to achieve the end goal faster. 

If you don’t adopt effective communication and collaborative methods between everyone involved in the software advancement, testing, delivery, and operational approach, automating your processes will not generate the business advantages you desire.

It’s all about the Metrics

One of the most neglected actions in DevOps adoption is choosing the correct metrics to register and track progress. Installing the appropriate baseline DevOps metrics early on and not being frightened to regulate things that may initially not seem very good is the answer to being capable of showing illustrative progress over time.

These are a few DevOps metrics that are critical:

Production Failure Rate

This metric analyses how frequently the software crashes in production through a fixed period.

Mean Time to Recover

This metric shows how long it needs an application in production to recover from a crash. 

Average Lead Time

This metric identifies how long a brand-new requirement needs to be developed, examined, delivered, and deployed into production. 

Deployment Speed

With the help of this metric, identify how quickly you can deploy a fresh version of an application to a specific environment (synthesis, analysis, presentation, preproduction, or production situations). 

Deployment Frequency

Use this metric to analyze how frequently you deploy current release applicants to examine, performance, preproduction, and production situations

Mean Time to Production

This metric shows you how long it takes when a brand-new code is assigned to a code receptacle for it to be deployed to production.

There are several additional metrics you can make use of too. However, avoid gathering an abundance of metrics that seem impressive but don’t suit your business interest. Moreover, stay away from metrics that are quickly gamed, which means that they make your team look great but don’t add any value to business objectives, such as the number of commits your team executes.

Once you’ve decided on the metrics you prefer to implement and have a baseline of where you presently stand, fix goals for every metric, so the team understands what to aim for.

Most importantly, regularly share your DevOps purposes, metrics, and growth with everyone included. Establish a metrics dashboard that demonstrates current metrics and growth to your goals. 

Giving actual clarity is a tough ask for teams to do. Still, it will encourage more efficient interaction and collaboration, while breaking down boundaries among the development and operations teams in the process.

Customize to Match Your Requirements 

There is no “one size fits all” solution for DevOps. You cannot simply drop in an automatic tool or employ a self-proclaimed “DevOps Engineer” and expect to achieve success. Each organization will have a different DevOps journey according to its niche and experience. That journey will be more relevant to changing enterprise practices and communication patterns than using tools to enable automation.

DevOps is a process of stimulating the production and delivery of quality software, but it will only work if you concentrate on what makes business sense for your company. For example, if your clients can’t use ten to twenty updates to your product a day, don’t make doing so your purpose! Instead, concentrate on enhancing usability, safety, or some other important quality that your client cares more about.

Make Use of Automation 

The main aspect to ensure you’re able to accelerate your delivery process is automation. To accomplish this, everything from the infrastructure, environment, configuration, platform, and build, to testing and the process should be defined and written in code. 

If you notice certain gaps in the existing process or that something is broken or prone to error, you must start automation from that area first. By doing this, your team can reduce delivery teams, increase repeatability, and eliminate configuration drift. 

Final Thoughts

A company can’t just enter into ‘DevOps mode,’ or purchase a ‘DevOps certification.’ It’s something you can only accomplish with a lot of hard work and self-discipline. 

It will take time, and there will be a few challenges, but if you observe the approaches laid out above, you will meet your bases and will cover the key aspects of adopting a DevOps culture within the organization. The change should happen by getting the enterprise teams aligned with DevOps best practices and training them across popular DevOps certification courses which will be the starting point for a successful DevOps journey in the organization. 

Some of the popular industry-recognized DevOps courses are:

 

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Ethan Miller is a technology enthusiast with his major interest in DevOps adoption across industry sectors. He works as a DevOps Engineer and leads DevOps practices on Agile transformations. Ethan possesses 8+ years of experience in accelerating software delivery using innovative approaches and focuses on various aspects of the production phase to ensure timeliness and quality. He has varied experience in helping both private and public entities in the US and abroad to adopt DevOps and achieve efficient IT service delivery.

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