DevOps Visibility As The First Step In the Value Chain
Visibility is critical in a DevOps environment. Modern software development is more complex than ever — a single enterprise project can have dozens of stakeholders and hundreds of APIs. Even when it’s clear teams are feeling DevOps pain, the source of that pain can be far from obvious. Without visibility, you're looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why it’s the first of Copado’s Five Steps to DevOps Success.
What is DevOps visibility? Well, it's a combination of things, from proper version control and pipeline management to a transparent organizational culture. Without visibility, you won’t have the information you need to improve quality or accelerate releases.
Signs You Lack DevOps Visibility
About 83% of IT decision-makers report their organizations have adopted DevOps practices to improve software, but not all of them have reported success. When your organization experiences DevOps pain, the first step is to check for where you’re lacking visibility.
Here are three indications you don’t have visibility where you need it:
Emphasizing and Supporting DevOps Visibility
Time and energy are in short supply, and people waste an enormous amount when they don’t have what they need to do their jobs. Visibility is foundational because it provides the insights necessary to get work done. It encompasses everything from situational awareness to version control, planning tools, traceability, auditability and compliance. To balance all that, you need to look at seven different areas:
System changes require tracking to ensure version consistency. Visibility also helps to avoid overwrites, metadata conflicts and the frequent introduction (or recurrence) of bugs. |
Dependencies occur at every level of the software supply chain: teams, systems, packages and within a codebase. If we understand how these connect, we also see the potential impact of changes. |
How We Built DevOps Visibility
If you want to support visibility, you need tools to increase transparency and reproducibility throughout the software development lifecycle. Here are a few visibility best practices to increase your DevOps ROI:
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Adopt Version Control: Version control is an automated method of tracking changes to code. Updates are kept in an immutable log that developers and stakeholders can reference and roll back to if problems arise. This becomes the single source of truth that coders can turn to as they manage their updates.
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Connect User Stories and Metadata: When you tie changes in version control to user stories, you get just that: A story that explains the who, what, where, when and why of changes.Specifically, you connect:
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The exact change
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When it was made
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Who did it
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Why they did it
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If anything else was changed
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The goal of the change
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Historical changes to the same material
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Organize the Architecture: Noisy metadata can obscure architecture visibility. Shine a light on your architecture by organizing it into folders and packages.
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Streamline the Full Stack: Salesforce probably isn’t the only SaaS in your cloud stack. The DevOps platform you choose should be one that supports multiple cloud hosted applications and helps you tie them all together.
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Enable Value Stream Management: Value stream management starts with mapping. In this, you visualize workflow to understand where your bottlenecks lie. Once you locate these spots, you can look for causes. You can make improvements, eliminate waste and focus on your strongest value drivers. The key is connections. You need the full picture of all your tools, applications, SaaS solutions and other components in one single place. VSM platforms make it possible to tie these disparate systems together.
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Leverage DORA metrics: DORA metrics will test your overall process to see where you compare to others. These metrics are the same needed for performance visibility: lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate and time to restore. DORA rates organizations into four categories: elite, high, medium and low. That can be applied across a wide range of questions to quantify results.
Incorporating all of these components can improve your DevOps visibility, shining a light on the places in your process where value is stuck. Once you understand the bottlenecks that your organization faces, you can start resolving them. Visibility gives you the information you need to turn your attention further down the pipeline. Then you can begin to increase quality, improve your speed to deployment, start innovating and finally achieve resilient development processes.