What is DevOps?

First coined by Patrick Debois, DevOps is a portmanteau of “development” and “operations.” It is a practice that has been gaining steam amongst many developers, QA testers, IT workers, and more. But what exactly is DevOps? And how could it benefit your organization? Read on to learn more:

What is it?

DevOps is not a specific test or tool. Instead, it is a culture. DevOps is a method of removing barriers between typically siloed teams. In this case, it means removing barriers between the software development and operations teams (hence the name “DevOps”), allowing them to work more closely together.

What are the benefits of DevOps?

Changing how your organization functions is never easy but instituting the DevOps model is often worth it. DevOps allows for greater collaboration between different teams, and that collaboration can lead to the following:

• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Reliability
• Increased response rate
• Rapid delivery

What does a DevOps culture look like?

So, when you implement DevOps into your organization, what will it look like? Namely, you will experience a few changes under this new culture. These include the following:

• Shorter release cycles: DevOps releases software and application updates in short cycles. By making progress incremental, there is less risk involved and planning is easier.
• Greater collaboration: DevOps relies specifically on collaboration. A healthy DevOps culture will have individuals from various teams working together to solve problems.
• Greater accountability: You will have people from various teams working on various stages of your application. As such, people are more likely to take ownership and get involved .
• Continuous learning: A healthy DevOps environment will work under a growth mindset. This means that your team will be constantly learning and incorporating what they’ve learned into your application.

How does DevOps influence the application lifecycle?

A true DevOps culture will influence the application lifecycle in all of its four phases. Each phase depends on the other, and each role in your DevOps team is involved in each phase. Here’s how it will work:

• Plan: During the plan phase, your DevOps team will create, define, and describe all of your application’s capabilities. You will begin creating backlogs, managing agile software development, tracking bugs, and more.
• Develop: The development phase is all about coding. Your DevOps team will write, test, review, and integrate your code all without sacrificing quality or stability. 
• Deliver: The delivery phase is when you send your application into production and eventually release it to the public. Teams will figure out how to release your application through specific, manual approval stages.
• Operate: Finally, there is the operation stage. This is when your application is fully operational and teams focus on monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting.

What about continuous testing?

A crucial part of DevOps is continuous testing. Continuous testing involves three strategies that speed up testing and help deliver updates in a quicker, more efficient fashion. They include:

• Continuous integration: Creates a shared repository for code changes that is automatically tested multiple times.
• Continuous delivery: Takes the updates and code changes made in the shared repository and pushes them out to the public automatically, though it does require manual approval.
• Continuous deployment: The same as continuous delivery but it does not require manual approval to push out changes.

Here at Beta Breakers, we provide DevOps and continuous testing solutions. To learn more, contact us today.