Part four:
Quality and reliability

Leveraging continuous delivery, quality assurance, and infrastructure as code to maintain high standards and dependable software performance.

Discover your DevOps state

Part four:

Quality and reliability

DevOps, DevEx, and platform engineering don’t just speed things up with no concern for the outcome. They maximise developer productivity and emphasise continuous testing and monitoring, helping ensure high-quality, reliable code and contributing to the overall performance of your software delivery.

We’ve already talked about how successful DevOps demands a collaborative, agile culture, and the steps to take to make your DevOps efforts more efficient. But what strategies do you need to have in place to get your code up to scratch so your developers and customers can count on it?

Continuous delivery

DevOps gets everyone on the same page, which alone makes it much easier to create a high-quality product. With CD pipelines, you can add new features, manage configuration, and fix bugs, while releasing software updates quickly without compromising on quality and reliability. These pipelines also ensure you can stick to your timeline, while keeping manual intervention to a minimum. And with automated testing and quality assurance practices (see below), CD pipelines help reduce code errors.

Quality assurance

An effective DevOps strategy also takes QA into consideration, eliminating miscommunication so QA understands developmental requirements and vice versa.
QA plays a vital role in product quality, making sure the development team is delivering the operational team’s technical requirements and that the product aligns with business goals.

QA brings a different, wider perspective to product builds – one that actually reflects user behaviour rather than the more idealised view sometimes held by developers. With this extra set of eyes in place, developers can focus more on new feature innovations, rather than visiting previous commits.

Testing is where QA really shows its value. When it’s working well, QA enriches the testing process and the product by testing new iterations in parallel and in real-time. This not only eases the product pipeline but helps mitigate failures and validate your DevOps testing practices

Discover your DevOps state

Infrastructure as Code

Without IaC, your teams will have to individually maintain your deployment environment settings, leading to inconsistency and issues. Adopting IaC automates your IT system, ensuring your infrastructure remains in its intended state. With an effective strategy in place, management of any deviations from this intended state is automated, reducing the risk of manual omittance or error.

It also allows you to reliably deliver stable test environments rapidly and at scale – vital for testing applications in production-like environments early on in the development cycle.

DevSecOps

By integrating security practices throughout your DevOps software development life cycle, you can develop much higher-quality products, free from compliance issues. By shifting security left, you can detect and prevent vulnerabilities much earlier, improving the overall quality of your software and ensuring security is top of mind for all your teams. We talk more about the importance of a DevSecOps approach in part five.

The power of the platform

Platform engineering helps you align development practices with business priorities. With the IDP at its core, you can reduce the burden on developers who previously had to manage a complex set of tools and infrastructure requirements.

With a platform engineering team in place, you can automate infrastructure management and enable developers to self-serve using reliable tools and workflows, reducing their cognitive load. This puts developers in a better position to respond to customer demands and market changes. In essence, the team provides a stable foundation for everything to be built from to the standards you set.

Alongside the implementation and maintenance of your IDP, platform engineering demands:

A unified system to manage and scale your DevOps processes and workflows – with a well-maintained catalogue of vetted resources, you create clear paths for developers to follow, simplifying development and reducing the risk of error.
SLAs to hold the platform team accountable – the IDP is their product and developers are their customers. These service-level agreements help ensure high expectations are set and met for the platform’s reliability and performance.
Monitoring to keep improving the platform engineering performance and developer productivity -- to ensure the IDP meets developers’ needs and the business’s goals. These metrics determine where changes need to be made, such as increasing the number of tests or improving alerting capabilities.