What is DevOps and How can it give a Boost to Software Development?
Developing and implementing software in today’s fast-paced business environment requires the best software development techniques and solutions to ensure your customers get the best service and experience while using your software.
According to a survey, 51% of DevOps users today apply DevOps to new and existing applications. By 2026, its market will undergo a dynamic transition as advancements in automated software development and zero-touch automation technologies drive the DevOps tools’ demand.
The use of DevOps has been proven to help increase the efficiency of the software development process, leading to faster release cycles and ultimately better customer satisfaction with the products you are delivering.
If you’re considering adopting DevOps practices into your organization, then take some time now to learn more about what exactly DevOps is and how it can benefit your business.
What is DevOps?
Adopting a DevOps culture within your organization will help you to accelerate software development. A recent Puppet survey found that companies with a mature DevOps practice have grown over four times faster than those without it. It is mainly due to their ability to experiment and implement changes quickly and easily by building more stability into each release and deploying new updates and features much more rapidly than before.
This increased deployment frequency enables organizations to capitalize on market trends or consumer demand more quickly, ensuring they remain competitive in an increasingly fast-paced marketplace. Now, let’s dive into the reasons why DevOps is essential for software development.
The Top Benefits of Using DevOps in Software Development:
1) Improved Testing Capabilities
In addition to testing for functional bugs, there’s also a variety of non-functional testing. For example, you can test your system to ensure it’s fast and reliable at a high volume of users—no matter how many people are on your website. Using automated testing will help you scale your systems as needed.
Testing is a vital part of DevOps because its success depends so much on speed and reliability. Your platform needs to handle peak traffic with ease to be genuinely operational, which means frequent regression testing.
2) Increased Quality Products
If you’re struggling to turn software products around promptly, it may be time to adopt a new approach. Using DevOps software solutions can help you produce high-quality products quickly, cutting down on waste and costly mistakes. Even if you have your product development dialed in, these tools might still be worth considering to scale up your business operations.
Deploying even a simple change could take days or weeks under traditional development models. If someone screwed up along the way, everything had to start from scratch. With DevOps practices, once you build software from source code, you can push it out immediately without approval from any of your stakeholders. So long as it meets all relevant criteria (e.g., load tests), anyone on your team can instantly deploy any new feature they want.
3) Better Deployment Processes
When you cannot quickly push out new features and bug fixes, you might find that users aren’t even taking notice of your updates. Adding a DevOps element to your software development process can accelerate deployment and get new features to your customers sooner. It will get them more engaged with your platform, which is something we all want.
After all, there are plenty of alternatives for them if they don’t like what you have to offer. If they start getting bored or disappointed in what you have on offer, it won’t be long before they go elsewhere—and it could be hard to win them back once they leave for greener pastures.
4) Faster Time to Market
Studies have shown a strong correlation between using DevOps software solutions and getting to market faster. DevOps aims to promote cooperation among developers, sysadmins, testers, and other IT professionals, resulting in an accelerated time-to-market for new products.
Nowadays, every business wants to get to market faster. Using DevOps software solutions is one way to get there. Instead of having each group work independently (as they would with traditional development processes), working together means information gets passed back and forth quickly so things can be changed as soon as they’re discovered. For example, if testing reveals bugs, it’s easier to fix them before deploying than after.
5) Better Security
Security is one of those things that can be hard to measure. It’s also one of those things people tend to only talk about when something wrong happens. Despite all that, it’s essential—especially as we move toward a cloud-based future. Given all that, using DevOps principles and tools will improve your organization’s security and harden your systems and applications against vulnerabilities and weaknesses. That goes for both your custom solutions and any off-the-shelf software you use. Once you start looking at things from a DevOps standpoint, improving security will become easier until someone launches another round of attacks.
6) Streamlined Operations Team Management
One of my favorite things about DevOps is that it forces teams to get creative about optimizing their customer relationships. In a traditional software development cycle, there’s typically a handoff from marketing and sales to development. It works well for some projects—but can cause problems on more complex initiatives.
When DevOps is included from day one, they develop a symbiotic relationship where team members depend on one another throughout every phase of product development. Not only does including your whole team ensure you have access to all relevant perspectives upfront, but it also saves time. It allows your engineers to continue collaborating through delivery instead of becoming siloed when one passes off work to another group.
7) Optimized Customer Relationships
The conventional way of interacting with customers is changing. Businesses are more and more moving towards adopting customer relationship management (CRM) solutions for better managing and monitoring relations with customers. As a result, they can cater to their clients on a one-to-one basis and provide them with an experience that is personalized and fast. This makes it all that much easier to keep your existing clients happy and find new ones.
Companies who use CRM will also make better business decisions thanks to having detailed information about their products or services. There are opportunities for growth or areas where things need improvement. Such systems provide businesses with invaluable data and help save time while making data easy to retrieve at any given point in time.
8) No Fear of Change
Doing software development as a service will help you save money and time by ensuring your project runs smoothly. Since you can easily outsource, you’ll never be short of developers when you need them. And, since freelancers work with many clients at once, they tend to handle their tasks more efficiently than those who do it as a full-time job. They also have no fear of change—meaning that if your company’s new direction requires a different approach from what was initially planned, they won’t complain or put up roadblocks.
9) Improved Communication Between Teams & Stakeholders
The most crucial benefit of DevOps software solutions is that it saves money. It is an efficient way to gain project delivery speed while saving time, money, and effort. It allows businesses to be agile so that they can meet their clients’ demands quickly. It also means developers are more likely to produce better-quality code more quickly, which will save you loads of time later on down the line when looking for someone to maintain your product or service.
A company that knows how to use DevOps can outdo its competitors easily due to lower costs. Another great advantage of hiring talented staff like skilled professionals instead of generalists is that everyone becomes an expert at something specific; not many companies can boast of having staff experts in marketing, development, management, etc. If they do have staff experts at one thing, then chances are there isn’t anyone who knows how to handle things outside their field of expertise.
10) Costs Less Money & Saves Time
Before a company implements a DevOps strategy, it has first to know its current software development process. Then it can more easily figure out where time and money are being lost. By switching to a more efficient method of developing software, companies save money and time from those two primary resources and resources on top of them, such as employee morale.
Ultimately saving all of these different resources means extra money back into everyone’s pockets; if employees’ hands aren’t tied up with administrative tasks. Everyone who works for or with that business will save both time and money because it will waste less through inefficient software development. They’ll also be able to put their minds toward other innovative ideas which could earn even more revenue for your business.
11) Improved Focus on What Matters Most
An effective DevOps pipeline can increase productivity and allow for easier collaboration between teams—which means developers can focus on what matters most. With a seamless process from code to production, developers can iterate more quickly and deliver better products in less time. A strong focus on automation leads to greater efficiency and consistency of product releases while reducing human error.
Wrapping it Up
If you want to accelerate your software development process, DevOps could be a smart way to do so. With these top reasons and much more below, we hope you can now see how using DevOps can help to propel your company into a much-needed position of dominance.
Now is not too late; there is still time for you to get ahead before your competitors—start today!