Transition to DevOps

IT projects for years have always extended beyond planned schedules and over spent the forecasted budget. We have all experienced it and to some extent we have become accustomed to these failings and commonly accept it as part of everyday project life. Project issues are often passed between teams, from QA to Dev to BA’s and Project Management. Quite quickly an “us versus them” mentality can develop. Not only that, but the feedback loop is often convoluted and inefficient, leading to delays in issue resolution costing both time and money.

This delivery sequence creates an air of nervousness and operational teams now become anxious about any deployments, deeming them to be risky and therefore push back on the amount of changes they are willing to accept into production. This should not be the case.

Step forward the DevOps movement.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a movement which aims to solve a lot of the above problems. It’s key change is one of communication and collaboration between teams. It aims to build cross-functional teams who work together with one ultimate goal and that is to deliver high quality software, continuously and as efficiently as possible. It shares the same objective as the Continuous Delivery approach, but rather than wholly relying on tools, its success is dependent on the people to come together and deliver as one.

Transition to DevOps

Implementing a DevOps methodology is more about managing a cultural shift in your organisation. For start-ups and smaller organisations, this culture generally already exists as it enables rapid delivery and flexibility to handle changing circumstances. However, in larger enterprises, this adoption is often quite slow. You cannot expect such a culture change to be achieved overnight. Here are some tips to help get started on this road to transition.

1.      Culture change needs to come from the top

As DevOps is mostly about a cultural change, this needs to be accepted and executed from the management level down. Management must acknowledge that collaboration across teams is critical and it is their duty to be role models. Before setting off on this journey, a consensus between teams must be settled to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction. All roles and responsibilities must be clearly outlined from the outset and all qualms about process needs to be addressed immediately.

2.      Carefully select the right tool chain

There are countless tools, both open source and licenced which will aid delivery every step of the way. However, it is important that you select the right tools for the size and scale of your organisation. The following are a sample set of tools available to support a DevOps environment:

• Plan – JIRA / Confluence
• Code – Eclipse
• Build – GitHub / GitLab / Maven
• Test – Selenium / JMeter / Tricentis Tosca / Sauce Labs
• Release – Jenkins / Docker / Puppet / Ansible
• Monitor – Nagios / Splunk / Loggly

3.      Start Small

Once the appropriate teams are on board and the right tools are in place, now it is time to execute. However, rather than jumping into the deep end, select a relatively small-scale project to begin with. This will allow management of inevitable issues to be easily ironed out without significant disruption to the delivery of the solution.

After the delivery process is refined, it is time to adopt DevOps at scale. This will involve spreading the new ways of working across the organisation, changing people’s mindsets and upskilling them on the methodologies and tools. This will include involving other departments such as finance and risk.

Be aware that transitioning to a DevOps culture is never fully complete. There will always be improvements to be made, with changes to technologies and tools and continuously improving methods and processes. It is important to monitor progress of the transition and ensure that there are some actionable insights which will help teams succeed.