DevOps plays an important role in an organization’s digital transformation efforts, helping to replace traditional business processes with digital technologies.
DevOps and digital transformation are intrinsically connected. Both aim to improve, advance, or streamline ways of working so companies are ready to conduct business in the digital age.
Let’s discuss how to leverage DevOps for digital transformation.
What Is DevOps?
Created by software engineers, DevOps is a flexible practice specifically designed for software development. DevOps combines two key elements:
- Software development (Dev)
- IT operations (Ops)
As companies introduce digital processes and automation to replace analog processes, the DevOps framework provides an approach to technology that fits well.
How DevOps Is Useful in Digital Transformation?
Before DevOps, development, and operations teams working in isolation. Each team adopted its own set of tools, processes, frameworks, and vocabulary. Neither aligned nor integrated with other teams or practices.
Previously, testing and deployment tasks (Ops) were completed after the design and build process (Dev). That took longer, as each had different timelines. Additionally, manual code development could potentially introduce human error in software production. As a result, organizations experienced bottlenecks, confusion, and delays.
In contrast, DevOps aligns development and operation practices to reduce issues as software applications are developed, deployed, and maintained. DevOps improves both collaboration and communication within software development to shorten the development lifecycle, while also enabling continuous delivery and high quality.
DevOps offers competitive advantages, as well as strengthens customer service and engagement. It also complements the agile software development approach and some components overlap. (Agile describes a software development approach that encourages flexible responses to change. It employs continual planning, learning, improvement, team collaboration, evolutionary development, and early delivery.)
How Do DevOps Processes Support Digital Transformation?
DevOps plays a role in digital transformation by helping organizations understand the patterns and practices that are likely to improve their performance in the face of digital disruption, thus improving their ability to compete in their market.
The essential element of a DevOps transformation is bringing teams together. It is a product development approach to operations.
One such example is cloud IDEs, which are integrated development environments based in the cloud. While traditionally developers set up IDEs on their local machine, cloud-based IDEs allow software development with just a browser.
DevOps drastically improves agility, allowing extremely fast responses to changing requirements or market conditions. It can aid with digital transformation by enabling continuous integration and delivery services, helping organizations move towards constant improvements in developing a software application. That also enables organizations to release new value to their customers faster.
What Should I Know About DevOps?
While DevOps is often described as a set of tools, it’s also a culture, where companies replace organizational silos with an approach that prioritizes people and collaborative processes.
It can require some significant changes from a traditional hierarchical structure. When using DevOps, a company focuses on autonomy and alignment. Authority is distributed, and all teams and team members are empowered to contribute. Additionally, clear success criteria are provided, and metrics tie back to customer outcomes.
How to Measure DevOps Success?
While digital transformation is often an aspirational goal, metrics can be applied to DevOps to help measure progress. These key metrics for DevOps include the amount of time it takes to execute a given task and how well that process was executed.
Idealistic and indistinct objectives like time and quality are broken down into more discrete metrics for development cycles, testing, building, deploying, and operations. These metrics should include both internal performance and external experience.
In a digital landscape, DevOps and digital transformation success work together for continuous improvement in software development. That allows organizations to transform their software development process, improving their ability to conduct business in the digital age.
InApp specializes in DevOps and digital transformation. Contact us to learn more about how we can help your organization.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can DevOps speed digital transformation?
DevOps improves digital transformation efforts by improving workflows, shortening feedback loops, and encouraging continuous learning and experimentation.
What are the steps involved in DevOps?
- Outline tasks, schedules, and project management tools.
- Choose a collaboration tool for code development and review.
- Build the source code in the desired format and preferred architecture.
- Set up continuous integration tools.
- Compile, test, and deploy code on the preferred architecture, including workflows for continuous testing.
- Release completed and tested code.
- Deploy new features.
- Continue to monitor and identify potential issues or improvements.
Is DevOps a digital transformation?
Yes. DevOps can aid companies with digital transformation by improving software development. It brings development processes and operational processes together. DevOps improves both collaboration and communication within software development to shorten the development lifecycle, while also enabling continuous delivery and high quality.
What is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps is short for development (Dev), security (Sec), and operations (Ops). With this approach, security becomes a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle, from initial design through integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery.
