Wikipedia says that DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations and that it aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Okay, we understand that but it’s often quite difficult to understand what are the actual benefits implementing DevOps into your business, right?
Don’t worry because this article has been curated just to answer that specific question. So, the following are the key benefits of implementing DevOps into your business practices –
Cooperation
DevOps, in theory, is a modern version of various lean and agile software development methods of the past. It is primarily focused on operations also. As a result, DevOps creates and supports a scenario where various teams of different nature and responsibilities work together towards completing the shared objectives of the company. As such, the teams won’t be working in isolation which eliminates miscommunication and also singular mind-sets towards achieving only their departmental goals. This also promotes people from different teams to come together and formulate plans that’ll help everyone reach the desired and shared faster and efficiently.
Faster execution of business functions
One of the obvious advantages of DevOps is that it speeds up the general functions of your business.
The sooner you release quality software; the sooner you can reap the commercial benefits of your product’s features. The time needed to test a product depends on the environment in which it is tested. For software updates/upgrades, testing times are usually relatively fast due to the presence of a test environment. However, testing a new product takes a long time because the operations team will have to create a new test environment. Through automated testing and integration, DevOps accelerates the speed of delivering features and changes to your software. It allows your developers to monitor the product at all times for any bugs or software updates, thus, in turn, reducing the time needed for tracking, monitoring, and debugging time and helping to increase your time-to-market.
Innovation
One of the most clinical advantages of using DevOps is business innovation. Innovation usually occurs by making crucial changes to a process or system that already exists, creating some new ones or a better option to an earlier process. With faster software development times, the developers then get more free time to think and work on testing additional features or vastly improving the existing features’ performance with an innovative mind-set. Also, DevOps drives innovation by enabling teams to learn more and understand customer expectations better. Innovation often comes from thinking of a certain problem or idea from different viewpoints and perspectives and brainstorming ideas with each other. DevOps helps in developing and encouraging such an environment where developers feel not bound by an inflexible set of instructions.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is one of those things that can make or break your business. It is crucial for your business to thrive because winning new customers is much more expensive than retaining existing customers through increasing customer satisfaction. Fortunately, one of the key benefits of DevOps is improving customer experience and ultimately customer satisfaction.
Feedback is essential to any successful project and also of DevOps. A feedback loop is a continuous cycle of information exchange between two parties. It helps to ensure that both parties are working towards the same goal. When done well, it ensures that everyone is on the same page and that there are no misunderstandings. For example, if you’re developing a website, then you need to get feedback from your customers about what works and what doesn’t. You also need to get feedback from other stakeholders like marketing, sales, and IT. If you’re doing agile development, then you should be getting feedback from your team members throughout the sprints. And since DevOps accelerates the process of delivering software, it has a direct impact on maintaining a positive feedback loop mechanism.
Agility
Modern consumers have high expectations for both the intricacy of the products and the delivery times. Enterprises must incorporate agility into their processes to meet these challenges and stay ahead of the competition. Agility in this context is more of an all-encompassing term that refers to a variety of cutting-edge skills. DevOps checks off every box that is typically thought of as a part of agility, enabling firms to be nimbler, as it also helps with cloud migration. When it comes to balancing an organization’s capacity as a result of demand changes, for example, DevOps methods enable flexibility. In order to consistently supply features that are valuable to the customers, it helps them to understand how they use the products and their general preferences.
Additionally, it enables management of the features and specifications for numerous applications running on various platforms. Adopting DevOps also makes change management easier to implement and makes sure that it doesn’t impede or stop the ongoing process. Additionally, it aids IT leaders in overcoming difficulties that are generally brought on by a few teams working on several discrete processes. However, using several tools across teams will likely present some difficulties for you, which we can assist you in overcoming.
