Establishing a successful culture around DevOps principles

With 2023 fast approaching, the demand to constantly enhance businesses’ digital experience is increasing rapidly. Enterprises are now adopting DevOps principles to streamline their activities like the development, deployment, and management of their software.

DevOps is a practice that unites the processes of development, operations, and quality assurance, making way for cross-functional communication, end-to-end responsibility, and collaboration of teams. A combined effort of development and operations teams, DevOps is a natural extension of the Agile methodology.

Let’s look deeper into what DevOps culture is.

What is DevOps culture?

DevOps culture facilitates tighter collaboration and shared responsibility between the development and operation teams to enable them to work in tandem. With DevOps practices and principles laying the groundwork, the culture helps enterprises align their people, operations, and tools.

The DevOps culture is an approach where multidisciplinary teams take responsibility for the entire lifecycle of a product. The teams embrace a culture that increases transparency, communication, and collaboration. But the most notable shift created by the culture is that the development and operation teams get closer to each other. The DevOps culture highlights continuous learning and improvement, which they acquire through team autonomy, rapid feedback, high empathy, trust, and collaboration across teams.

What are the benefits of DevOps culture?

The impact of DevOps on organizations is massive. Here are the key benefits of adopting the DevOps culture.

Collaboration and trust

The prima facie benefit of the DevOps culture is that it brings a collaborative and communicative spirit among various teams across an organization. Teams that work in silos don’t adhere to a unified thought in implementing actions, which affects the work of other departments. The lack of visibility and a shared goal cripples all teams in terms of work dependencies and setting priorities. It results in pointing fingers at others for losses and resulting in the ‘not my problem’ mentality. The DevOps approach and its tools make way for a holistic way of tackling problems, breaking down the barrier between development and operation teams.

Greater speed

With the need for speed increasing, DevOps makes way for faster releases with improved stability and higher quality. With DevOps tools creating an automated testing suite, review cycles are faster and the results more effective. Moreover, with tools for automation, teams can lower operating costs while increasing overall productivity.

Manage unplanned work better

Unplanned work can be a nuisance, often affecting the productivity of teams. As the DevOps implementation sets a clear process and priority list, it helps teams better manage unplanned work while continuing with planned activities. As the DevOps principles raise visibility and proactive retrospection, tackling unplanned activities is a smoother affair.

What are DevOps principles?

DevOps relies on various principles and strategies that drive collaboration, communication, sharing, and transparency, resulting in a holistic approach to software development. Here are the key DevOps principles.

Nourish a collaborative environment

The core principle behind fostering the DevOps culture is to bring the development and operations teams in unison to deliver business goals. In order to break down silos and lead the two groups together, the enterprise must encourage communication, idea-sharing, and problem-solving between development and operations. Companies must align their people, strategies, and tools toward meeting unified goals.

Nourishing a collaborative environment also means that the business must prepare for a cultural shift, starting from the top level. The organization creates a fluid experience within its workforce, helping them to handle any surprises coming along their way.

Set end-to-end responsibility

Traditional software development practices differentiate the tasks and responsibilities that the development and operations teams handle. However, the DevOps culture makes them work in tandem and take full accountability for the application end-to-end, controlling the software development from ideation to maintenance to retirement.

Boost continuous revisions

In the current times, organizations must adapt to relentless changes, be it the emergence of new technology, customer needs, or transformations in the decree. Inspired by the Agile methodology, DevOps principles put a strong focus on continuous revisions and improvements to optimize performance, reduce operational costs, and deliver applications at a fast pace. The best DevOps practices unite teams and support continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines with their optimized performances and automation. This approach, involving great automation, increases the efficiency of building and deploying applications at a rapid pace and with minimal downtime.

Automate everything

Achieving continuous improvement is not an easy feat, as the need to respond to customer feedback is growing fast. To achieve this, brands are looking to automate their routine tasks and streamline processes including the CI/CD pipeline. Automation is a vital step towards reaching the full efficiency of the DevOps culture, enabling quicker software releases to their customers.

Concentrate on customer requests

The customer is the top priority for any business. A crucial DevOps principle is for the enterprise to act as a booming startup, striving for continuous innovation and problem-solving capabilities when its current strategy no longer works or fails to deliver on customer expectations.

DevOps teams must understand and meet the ever-evolving needs of their customers. With automation, the business can utilize data from various sources, ensuring they meet expectations. However, to deliver what the customer anticipates, the brands must focus on the correct data. With deep analytics, DevOps teams can create the perfect strategy and craft a personalized experience for their customers to keep them happy.

Learn from failures

Failure is not a full stop, but a comma: a sign to adapt and keep going further. To have a successful DevOps culture in its workforce, an organization must change its attitude toward handling failures.

A business creates an environment for learning simply by accepting its failures, hence bringing a positive impact on its work culture. The organization must collect reviews from its consumers and clients and analyze the feedback with a positive outlook. Critical feedback helps the organization understand its mistakes and fix them the next time.

Each loss is a new opportunity to observe and learn. In turn, the business looks forward to correcting its previous mistakes on the go and pushing itself further ahead in the race.

Unite teams and expertise

The core purpose of DevOps is to unite various teams. Software process development requires the involvement of different units at every stage of its life cycle, like planning, building, deployment, feedback, and revision. The need is for a cross-functional team with each member possessing a balanced and well-rounded skill set. Organizations look to foster communication between teams, encouraging them to share responsibility when handling tasks.

What are the goals of the DevOps culture?

What is the purpose of setting DevOps Goals? For an organization to develop an application from idea to live optimally, they need to set goals and have the best DevOps practices. The goals help them deliver results quickly and more efficiently, experience fewer failures, and increase the frequency of deployments. Once the business has clarity on the DevOps principles, it must figure out the ultimate goals.

The enterprise must set the DevOps goals as per the growth expectations, the current growth rate of the company, and other factors. The software company can set goals that are either attainable goals or extremely high. The achievable smaller goals help DevOps teams bond over small victories. The extremely lofty targets require an elevated workforce and efficient communication to achieve

Fundamentally, the goals include:

• Breaking down communication barriers
• Creating cross-functional teams that work in synchronization and support each other
• Enhancing the flow of ideas and executing them faster.

Need to know more about DevOps and how it benefits your business? Let’s take a step forward.