Look at almost any modern-day business, and you’ll likely notice an in-house team of developers eagerly working on yet another tight deadline to deliver something extraordinary for their customers. Be it a brand-new application, a software solution, or an entire IT infrastructure, developers are the key piece of the puzzle for companies in all kinds of industries, and they often need to work closely with other teams of an organization in order to unleash their potential. After all, their work depends on your marketing team’s data, your finance department’s budget prognosis, and your operations managers.
As a result, a new strategy has emerged for companies that understand the value of internal collaboration: DevOps. This agile take on development allows companies to take better control over their projects, prevent many errors and failures, and stick to that go-to-market deadline without delays. DevOps consists of several different approaches and perks that ensure that your projects can develop smoothly, so let’s take a closer look at those that play a part in improving your release date effectively.
Faster updates and upgrades
Implementing this approach for your teams allows for another process to unravel more naturally and quickly: innovation. Brainstorming, exchanging ideas, and delivering suggestions are all part of the development process, but they rarely occur within the same project timeline, since each team waits for the other one to complete their part of the project to offer their feedback and ideas.
With DevOps, that’s no longer the case, since delays are unnecessary and can be avoided. Teams work together and communicate through a vast range of tools, thus utilizing every project stage to contribute and get creative. Testing that happens faster also helps your teams add more ideas into the mix, while they don’t stifle the development process, which is another reason innovation is possible under a DevOps structure.
Improved workflow within your business
The key ingredient to your development project’s success? People. However, different people often find it difficult to communicate when they are segmented across your organization, with little view of what other teams are up to, and with limited access to the progress of the project itself. Some organizations might have teams eager to collaborate and projects perfect for such agile processes but might lack the tools to implement them.
Many organizations turn to DevOps as a service to help their organization transition from that isolation model over to a more agile, collaboration-focused approach. Conveniently placed on the cloud, it allows all of your teams and individuals to work on the same project, exchange ideas, and be more productive business-wide. It might take time to train your employees to tackle different tools and their many features, but as soon as they get that essential grasp of what DevOps has to offer, they’ll certainly boost their collaboration, have access to their most vital data without delay, and work faster towards the same goals.
Agility over isolation
The agile nature of DevOps is one of its key features that enable developers to deliver the end product so quickly and efficiently. In this case, agile can mean many different things for various parts of your development projects. For example, an added layer of flexibility in the DevOps mindset enables your teams to pinpoint bottlenecks during a project and reallocate resources to resolve the issue faster.
Plus, agility allows developers to communicate with other teams within your business, get their suggestions, feedback, and ideas quickly, and implement the most feasible ones to create what is known as the minimal viable product, or MVP. Once it goes live, its development is far from over, another moment when agility empowers your development teams to continue improving the product beyond its delivery date.
Effective feedback utilization
Talk to any developer that has implemented an agile approach, and they’ll tell you the same thing: much like the research phase, which defines the success of your end product, the feedback you receive should be treated the same. DevOps enables development teams to collect, analyze, and implement user feedback into solutions that ultimately enhance the customer experience and the product itself. Without this collaborative approach, access to feedback is limited, if it exists at all.
DevOps effectively removes this obstacle by empowering all teams to participate in the process of collating, analyzing, and using that feedback for the final product. In turn, this allows your developers to release an updated version with new features preferred by your customers sooner than you think.
DevOps may not be the most novel of concepts in terms of enabling productivity among development teams, but it remains one of the most relevant accomplishments for modern businesses that need to speed up their delivery. Once you are able to create, test, and deploy your product faster, you will become a more competitive player in your field and a more trustworthy brand. Utilize DevOps to its full capacity, and you’ll likely reap all of the listed rewards of faster go-to-market delivery without sacrificing any of your product’s quality.
