How DevOps Can Accelerate Your Product Development?
In today’s competitive world, only speed and quality can get you ahead of your competitors.
The faster you get your product into the market, the better it is for your company’s growth. This is why companies from all around the world are always on the lookout for ways to accelerate their product development lifecycle.
But, achieving speed without sacrificing quality is often a challenge that most companies face.
This is where DevOps comes into picture…
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a group of practices which combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the life cycle of software development while delivering updates, features, and fixes in alignment to business goals continuously.
Simply put, DevOps is about monitoring all phases of the product development lifecycle, from conceptualization to design, development, integration, deployment, testing, and release.
The term “DevOps” was first coined by Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer in their “Agile Infrastructure” talk at the 2008 Agile Toronto Conference.
Since then, the DevOps methodology started becoming mainstream. In fact, many software & mobile app development companies have realized the need for DevOps and started adopting its practices.
Here’s how DevOps accelerates a product development lifecycle.
How DevOps Can Accelerate Product Development LifeCycle?
There are lots of ways in which companies can accelerate their product development lifecycle. But, the following are the most effective ways that you can embrace to speed up things in your product development.
1 — Faster Delivery of Features
When developers build software or application, they connect with the IT operations team to send the product for testing.
Now, if the software or the application is completely new, then the testing team needs to first establish a testing environment.
On the other hand, if the software of the application is just an updated version and a testing environment has already been created, the IT operations still need to add interfaces, side applications, and configure them.
That means, the developers can only deploy the product if the IT operations team have tested it.
In short, the entire process is very time-consuming.
But, DevOps can eliminate this entire process using automated testing.
With DevOps’s automated testing, the development team can get quick feedback and the automated integration makes the code changes automatically. As a result, companies can easily release small updates of their product faster.
2 — Enhanced Efficiency
The DevOps methodology encourages developers to devote their maximum time to value-creating work. And since automated testing and integration takes care of routine tedious work, developers do need to wait for code integration or configuration. Both these tasks can be simply done by clicking a button.
As a result, their work efficiency gets improved and they can focus more on challenging & value-creating work.
3 — Improved Quality of Code & Quick Recovery from Failures
Whenever a software, application, or product is released in the market, developers often move on to their next project immediately and the bug fixing and future updates become operations team’s responsibility.
But DevOps can help to keep developers in the loop during the entire lifecycle and not just development stage. This ultimately increases the quality of code as developers can easily identify bugs and fix them while keeping the same coding standards.
As a result, the quality of code gets improved and updates & fixes are delivered a lot faster.
Top Companies Using DevOps
As you can see, DevOps can hugely impact your product development lifecycle. It saves time, money, resources, and most importantly, it shortens the time-to-market of a product.
In fact, these benefits have also been realized by the following global brands.
Netflix
When Netflix was launched, there were no commercial tools available to run a cloud infrastructure smoothly. So, Netflix turned to open-source solutions to handle their cloud infrastructure.
With the help of volunteers, Netflix created Simian Army, which is a suite of automated tools.
The Simian Army allowed Netflix to automate testing and resolve bugs before they impacted their customers. And since then, Netflix is using open source tools and automation that allows them to deploy code thousands of times per day.
Airbnb
Airbnb is also a third-party platform company like Netflix. The company leverages mobile, analytics, social, and the cloud for providing their services.
Since Airbnb is a third-party platform, the company had no option but to adopt DevOps. And as a result, DevOps has helped Airbnb to release multiple small releases quickly and efficiently.
Etsy
Etsy is an Ecommerce website that sells vintage, hand-made items, and craft supplies. In the initial days, Etsy struggled a lot because of having a lot of silos and no collaboration between the development and operations team.
This led the company to struggle with slow deployments. Before adopting DevOps, the company was deploying new features and updates only twice a week. But after embracing DevOps as a Service, the company is now able to deploy new code 50 times per day.
As you can see from the above three examples, DevOps increases product development lifecycle drastically and helps companies deliver new features and updates at high velocity.
Conclusion
Today, competition is high in all sorts of businesses. And if you want to beat your competitors, then you must strive to launch your product to market faster. So, if you want to shorten your product’s time-to-market, it is necessary to identify and adopt the right DevOps practices in your product development.
