Part two:
Efficiency and agility

Implementing agile practices and automation to enhance software delivery and drive continuous improvement.

Part two:

Efficiency and agility

Collaboration is a key cultural touchstone of DevOps, but it’s not the only one. Efficient, navigable processes and an agile approach to software development are also essential if you want to achieve streamlined, frequent, high-quality software releases. The benefit of which not only increases your organisation’s productivity and performance but also helps ensure employee satisfaction.

So what does an efficient and agile culture look like in the context of DevOps?

Feel free to fail

Failure is an option – in fact it’s imperative. To create a culture of learning and improvement, you have to embrace and accept that failure will happen. Teams should feel safe and empowered to try new approaches without fear of failing. When failures inevitably occur, it’s important to turn these into learning opportunities.

Value fast feedback

Feedback enables continuous improvement. Rather than feedback about the performance and stability of application software never making it back to developers, in a DevOps culture, that feedback is immediate. Thanks to automation and continuous integration, new code is quickly built and tested, with developers receiving immediate feedback about its quality so they can rapidly iterate to improve it.

If you can, automate it

If you’re going to achieve continuous improvement, with the ability to respond immediately to customer feedback, you’re going to need to embrace automation. From infrastructure provisioning and software development to testing and release, there are a few things that can benefit from streamlined automation tools, freeing up your resources.

Discover your DevOps state

How to be more efficient

With efficiency and agility embedded into your culture, there are a number of key strategies and best practices you’ll want to employ to put that thinking into practice.

Agile project management

Agile methodologies can help DevOps teams to be more adaptable and respond to change quickly. They encourage constant communication and collaboration, helping you break large-scale projects down into smaller chunks so you can deliver work in increments, instead of building up to a big release date. Keep evaluating your requirements and plans, listen to feedback, and make changes as required. Embrace a core framework like Scrum or Kanban to plan, track, and measure this work.

CI/CD

By shifting left and bringing testing into your code development processes much earlier, developers can fix bugs and improve code quality as they go, rather than sending multiple changes to a separate testing team. To do this you need to be practising continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

With CI, code from multiple contributors is automatically built, tested, and checked to make sure it’s compatible with your existing codebase, helping you detect issues early on and reducing any conflicts. CD, meanwhile, allows for the rapid and reliable release of software updates that adhere to your timeline for a smooth delivery cycle. With automated testing and quality assurance practices, it means that the main branch of your repository is always deployable.

Microservices architecture

With a microservices architecture – where applications are broken down into smaller services – each service is focused on a specific business capability, meaning they can be developed and deployed independently of each other. Using containerisation and orchestration, you can improve agility and scalability, release features faster, and spend less time on maintenance and updates.

Discover your DevOps state

Automation

CI/CD is not the only automation you need to consider. Automated testing, including end-to-end, integration, and performance testing, is key to doing DevOps successfully. Tools like GitLab and Jenkins help to streamline these processes, reducing the risk of errors and speeding up processes.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools can automate the creation and management of infrastructure, including your servers, networks, and storage, while configuration management tools automate the configuration of these components. They ensure servers are configured consistently and that when changes are made, they’re repeatable and controlled.

Continuous monitoring

Regular tracking, using metrics and continuous monitoring dashboards, can help you identify and rectify issues early and mitigate against unplanned work. Broken builds or failed tests can cause unnecessary delays and inefficiency. But these tools can clue you in to system performance, customer feedback, and incident reports, as well as security issues (see part five). This practice is a key part of agile working, helping you to continuously improve your processes, so your teams can work smarter and release faster.