Top 7 DevOps Principles for Successful Development Teams

In recent years due to the advancement in technologies, DevOps, short for Development and Operations has emerged as a transformative approach that mainly streamlines software delivery, helps in enhancing collaboration, and accelerates the time-to-market. Thus DevOps is not just a tool within an organization but it is a cultural and technical movement that has a motive to break down the silos between the development and operations teams.

Therefore in this article, detailed knowledge has been provided about DevOps and the top 7 DevOps principles that are used for successful development teams.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of principles that are the fundamental groundwork of the culture of DevOps. The main objective of the DevOps methodology is to speed up the time to market apply the incremental improvements in response to the changing environment and develop a more streamlined development process. Therefore in simple terms, DevOps is one of the fields in engineering that is responsible for the designing implementation, and management of CI/CD frameworks.

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Top 7 DevOps Principles for Successful Development Teams

There are multiple DevOps principles which are there for managing successful development teams. Some of the top 7 DevOps principles for successful development teams are mentioned below:

1. Collaboration

DevOps refers to the integration of the operation and the development of teams which means that collaboration is the major part of DevOps. Therefore by working together, the development team can better configure the software for the operating phase and the operations to test the software to make sure that it fulfills the needs. Collaboration also depends on the information sharing practices which is an issue that is discovered while the applications are being deployed and should be adequately logged so that the other development team can account for this for future purposes.

2. Customer-Centric Decision Making

Customer-centric decision-making is an important DevOps principle that is mainly focused on the DevOps lifecycle and it is equally important as data and decisions should be made in such a way that the question should come to mind “Will this benefit the customer or their needs” ?. Therefore gathering feedback from the customers on the already existing products will further guide the future optimization. Hence the DevOps team also makes use of live monitoring strategies to address the problems and uses other tools to allow them to measure how end users interact with the applications in real time. The speed of the DevOps lifecycle then further allows the teams to update which aims to remove these pain points.

3. Making Data Based Decision

Data-based decision-making is another DevOps principle which is used for informing decisions with data. Therefore whether selecting the right tech stack or selecting the various types of tools to streamline the pipeline, the developers should always collect the data all around each decision to make sure that the choices agree with the historical data and team metrics. Hence having the knowledge of the average resolution time will help the developers to make informed decisions whenever introducing any new tools or procedures to the pipeline. Developers can compare their results against the benchmarks and have an idea about the new addition which will help the team in the future.

4. Automation

The major benefit of the DevOps approach is the speed of the software delivery and the speed of the patches. This momentum is mainly achieved with automation. The DevOps team has an objective to automate every single phase of the process from the code reviews to handoff to provisioning and deployment. This not only does allow the pipeline to move faster but it also leads to higher job satisfaction among the team members. Therefore they no longer need to perform manual and tedious tasks rather they can focus on higher order tasks like planning future improvements and researching new technologies.

5. Regular Improvement

The process of DevOps mainly focuses on a regular improvement and the development team should regularly focus on the new upgrades and features. The idea of Agile methodology mainly focuses on incremental releases. The past software development strategies aim to deliver the perfect product at once. Therefore in execution, it often means that the software deliveries would be delayed for long periods while the issues are been resolved. Incremental releases allow the teams to focus on achieving a minimum viable product to meet the customer’s core use cases as soon as possible. Hence once the MVP is being delivered the team then shifts to producing features to add additional value to the products and works their way towards better software.

6. Failure as a Learning Opportunity

The process of development is getting better day by day as the software itself is continuously improving. Thus the part of maintaining flexibility is to view the failure as an opportunity to learn and improve instead of trying to avoid the failure at any cost by encouraging risk-taking in the right context. Therefore risks come with the possibility of failure but it can also lead to success, no matter how the experiment goes you can have the knowledge of what kind of work works. Hence this experience helps to plan future strategies and acts as another main point in decision making.

7. Responsibility Throughout the Lifecycle

Earlier in the past the software development models, the development team coded and developed the applications. Then they hand it to the operations teams to test, deploy, and deliver to the customer. Therefore if any bugs or errors are been discovered in the second phase are left to the operations teams rather than the software developers who wrote the code. Hence DevOps shows a more logical approach and responsibility throughout the lifecycle. The whole team is mainly responsible for the product from the initial planning to its end. During the process, the operation and development teams are working hand in hand to update the software and address the issues.

Conclusion

DevOps embodies cultural philosophies and collaborative practices that aim to streamline the intricate software development and the deployment process. DevOps principles are the essential practice to automate as much of the software development life cycle as possible which provides the software developers more time to write code and create new features. Therefore, in this article, a comprehensive overview has been provided about the DevOps principles and the top 7 DevOps principles that are used for successful development teams.

FAQs

What do you mean by DevOps?

DevOps is defined as the combination of software development and operations. It is a type of software engineering methodology which aims to integrate the work of development teams and operations teams.

What is the purpose of DevOps?

DevOps helps in increasing the ability of an organization to deliver the applications and services at a high velocity by improving the products at a faster rate than the organizations by using infrastructure management and traditional software development processes.

Name the top DevOps principles used for successful development teams.

Some of the top DevOps principles which are used for the successful development teams are – Collaboration, customer centric decision making, Automation, Regular Improvement, Failure as a learning Opportunity and Responsibility throughout the lifecycle.