DevOps Imperative

DevOps Imperative

 Let’s understand why IT organisation wishes to “SHIFT LEFT” or implement DevOps.

What is DevOps? 

• Operation + Development team working together,
• Extend development to production,
• Create Production feedback into Development
• Embed Development into IT Operations

As per me it is an Old wine in a New bottle!

Why are we running after DevOps ?

There is value of DevOps;

•  Faster delivery of features
• More Stable operating environment
• Faster Time to Market and continual Improvement
• A single team is responsible for delivery
• Less work and Reduced IT wastage i.e. lean

 There was time during 80-90’s when single team used to manage the entire project i.e. design, development, testing, implementation, production support and maintenance work as well!

 Actually, development team used to manage everything!

During those time hardly any process (like documentation, review, estimation, checklist, template, validation, configuration management, centralised management, knowledge repository etc) was in practice.

Individual IT resource who used to possess multi skills became critical for an organisation.

These epitome started twisting their arms, thus becoming indispensable within the organisation. There was monopoly of these resources which started misusing organisation policies, no knowledge sharing with others was practised, no succession plan,eventually no knowledge repository.

Instead of fixed office duration of 9 hours,  people started working 4-5 hours a day as a practice, Friday half day or no work!

There was no discipline, one time delivery concept and thus  no way to measure project/product health issue risks, metrics etc.

Some of the key product makers like Microsoft, IBM, HP etc, are managed by  technical hands-hence are  holding shares in the organisation.Indiscipline work environment was not acceptable thus unable to bear the loss,  decided to outsource low end jobs like maintenance, production support, testing (hot patches fixes, regression testing, system integration testing), business analysis (to do documentation of business requirement).

To de-risks and improve the product’s quality every organisation started following various proven “Quality Management System process” i.e.  ISO 9001, CMMi, TMMi, 6Sigma, ITIL  etc all these process KPA’s 60 to 70% is same.

A well defined Quality Gates, RACI( Responsible, Accountable, Consulted & Informed) defined basically, entry, exit & deliverables identified, roles and responsibilities where splitted among various stake holder to de-risk the project and be in control of individual employees!

An example, earlier most of the requirement and work flow was never ever documented or stored in any centralised location, it remained with key employees hand or notebook, which product owner considered it as their individual properties and they never wished to share it with anyone.

During trouble shooting if such resource is unavailable it takes double amount of time to do only the root cause!

So necessity arises in the IT industry to implement Waterfall, V-Model, etc  Quality Management Framework.

In order to reduce the resource risk most of the IT organisation also started following and implementing QMS, Quality Gates became a global phenomenon.

Every organisation came with a concept i.e. no dependencies on any individual, as per SDLC/STLC process project where initiated and roll out, i.e.  business requirement to be documented by Business Analyst (deliverables Business Requirement  documentation) designing of SW product became the responsibilities of test architecture(deliverables Functional Requirement Documentation), development team started developing high level & low level design documents, based on BRD &FRD tester started developing test scenario mapping it to traceability matrix  for system integration test, finally to control project, quality, schedule, risks.A Project Manager’s responsibilities were created who is responsible to develop a master project plan to track the project schedule, cost resource on-boarding effort estimation etc.

To win the trust of customer and to monitor overall quality of project another role was created- SPEG (Software Process Engineering Group), who used to do an audit work check whether, agreed QMS process is followed or deviated from the mandate, if there is deviation or not and what is the justification for that?.

At the top, external quality certification teams like DNV, E&Y etc started certifying organisations’ maturity level with detailed check list .

 In order to win a big deal and trust of customer every IT organisation follows and sustains QMS framework like CMMI, TMM, ISO 6 Sigma etc.

To maintain quality standard it became mandatory to on-board large team size i.e. overhead of project so most of project’s gross margin  is also impacted.

 In the name of quality lot of organisation started making money and started creating various roles and position with no value being added to the client. Thus due to lack of transparency,lot of customers lost trust from their service provider.

Since these day’s there is major shift happening due to SMAC (social media, analytics, clouds) evolution, where faster delivery and ongoing changes need is in demand where every organisation expects short project lifecycle, low cost and short gain …

At the cost of defined robust process of SDLC/STLC being ignored, IT organisation started believing in DevOps/Agile process!!!

Believing resource overhead cost of the project will be reduced, resource size will be shrink, actually to make DevOps successful, skilled resource is the first pre-requisite! Lot of organisations started building multi skilled resource, however, there is another major challenge attrition, demand of such resource is so high in the market every good resource keep changing their job for higher salary.

You will find lot of organisation is struggling to sustain DevOps/Agile, as well quality of the product is also detoriated, check any online shopping website you will find there is major issue of performance, security, usability etc where quality of the product is not up to the mark.

Lot of banks started supporting mobility but it is observed very limited feature is available and due to security reasons customer doesn’t uses such devices.

So the conclusion is, before opting DevOps/Agile, it must ensured that appropriate pre-requisites are available, the organisation possess minimum quality guidelines and they are followed.

 I’ve shared my individual opinion and experience I’ve gained during projects.