CommunityDevOps ExchangePartners
Articles
7/12/2022
10 minutes

The DevOps Mindset: How To Adopt It Within Your Organization

Written by
Team Copado
Table of contents

You can’t purchase DevOps or become a DevOps organization overnight. The only way to successfully transition into DevOps and keep progressing along the path to DevOps success is to completely change your organization's culture. That means all stakeholders — from the C-suite to the development team and everyone who contributes to a project — must adopt the DevOps mindset.

The DevOps mindset prioritizes the following values:

  • Visibility: ensuring everyone has access to information and that your pipeline and processes are transparent.
  • Quality: improving the quality of your tools, training, processes, and overall product.
  • Speed: increasing the velocity of your development pipeline so you can release software faster and more frequently.
  • Resilience: ensuring teams can quickly adapt to changes and implement feedback with Agile development practices.
  • Collaboration: giving cross-functional teams the tools and support they need to work together without conflicts.
  • Continuous Improvement: always looking for opportunities to improve your processes, tools, training, and end product.

In this post, we’ll explain adopting the DevOps mindset and how you can apply these principles within your organization.

The DevOps Mindset: How to Adopt it Within Your Organization

Embracing the DevOps mindset means your organization needs to focus on:

Visibility

One of the cornerstones of DevOps is eliminating informational silos, so everyone is on the same page about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Teams can accomplish this using collaboration tools like Slack and source code version control tools that provide visibility into user stories and changes over time. In addition, you need visibility into every aspect of your pipeline so you can capture key metrics, identify issues, and streamline workflows.

Live metrics, and the ability to look back in time, are crucial for monitoring the organization's health and doing retrospectives on past issues. Tooling that provides accessible dashboards populated with live metrics and alerts is ideal. Accessible means people of varying technical abilities can easily see and work with dashboards without much training or hassle. 

Quality

For your DevOps adoption to succeed, you need quality tools that provide the necessary functionality without forcing team members to compromise or change their processes to fit the tools they’re given. Of course, there may be cases where you need to force teams into new development methodologies and tools to cultivate a more DevOps-friendly approach. In that event, you should make this transition as painless as possible. Explaining the benefits of the change and how it will save people time will be critical for team buy-in. In addition, you need to ensure teams have high-quality training on the tools and processes in their workflows so they can perform to the best of their ability. 

The quality of your processes is also important but harder to fix with an off-the-shelf tool — you need visibility into your pipeline to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks and find ways to optimize. 

Finally, the DevOps mindset also prioritizes the overall quality of your product, which is improved by shifting left (testing earlier and more frequently in the pipeline) and using test automation to catch defects and issues that a human might miss.

Speed

One of the primary goals of DevOps is to streamline the software development lifecycle (SDLC), so you can release software faster. Automation is key to achieving this speed. For example, continuous automated integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools reduce the manual intervention needed to integrate and build new code and deliver software to the various environments and stages in the pipeline. Test automation makes it possible for QA to shift left and validate software quality early and often without creating additional bottlenecks in the SDLC. Additionally, on the Ops side, automated configuration management and deployment tools help engineers provision new resources faster and more efficiently.

Resilience

It’s true that “the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.” No matter how well you plan out your development project, it’s almost guaranteed that something will force you to change or pivot unexpectedly at some point in the SDLC. Customers change their minds, business requirements shift, market conditions evolve, and unexpected problems pop up. 

The DevOps mindset promotes resilience, the ability to adapt to these changes on the fly without huge delays or other headaches. Resilience is achieved through Agile development processes such as breaking projects down into small iterative workloads and shortening feedback loops between end-users, QA, developers, and operations engineers.

Collaboration

The DevOps methodology was founded on a desire to break down barriers between the various teams involved in a development project — developers, sysadmins, QA, support staff, etc. This style of collaboration creates a more streamlined SDLC because it eliminates many of the factors that cause bottlenecks and friction between teams — for example, sysadmins know exactly what, when, and why they need to provision environments for developers, which ensures those developers get the exact resources they need on-time without worrying about delays or miscommunication. And hopefully, sysadmins are using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) to provision those environments. This allows developers to give their input via PRs (pull requests) so Ops and Dev can collaborate on the needs of the business.

According to Atlassian’s 2020 DevOps survey, collaboration is often the hardest DevOps principle for the C-suite to get on board with because executives are more likely to prioritize individual achievement above all other values. That creates a massive hurdle for organizations trying to shift their corporate culture to prioritize constant collaboration, which is critical to DevOps success.

It may be simpler to implement collaboration tools and processes in this area first — before you can truly change your culture. Once executives see real results from a more unified and streamlined DevOps team, they’re more likely to fully accept your culture shift. Suppose automation and version control allow team members to work on the same codebase simultaneously, which leads to faster releases and happier customers. In that case, executives won’t be able to ignore the business benefits of a collaborative culture.

Continuous Improvement

One of the scariest but most exciting aspects of the DevOps journey is that it never ends. Adopting the DevOps mindset means you’re constantly looking for ways to improve your visibility, quality, speed, resilience, and collaboration. That means with every iteration, you should collect DevOps metrics so you can identify opportunities to optimize and ensure that your processes and products are getting progressively better.

Some examples of DevOps metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should pay attention to include:

  • How fast you’re able to release software.
  • How frequently you’re releasing software.
  • How many defects are reported.
  • How long to fix bugs and other issues.
  • How long to see an ROI from new releases.

This continuous improvement should also extend to the people in your DevOps organization. Team members need insight into how well they’re performing and support in reaching their professional goals. If individuals have tangible proof that their knowledge and abilities are progressing, they’ll have greater motivation to continue improving the quality of their work, leading to a better end product.

Changing your entire corporate culture to adopt the DevOps mindset won’t happen overnight, and you’re sure to face some hurdles along the way. Luckily, you don’t have to make this journey alone. The DevOps experts at Copado Strategic Services can help your organization overcome the unique challenges and barriers you face on the road to digital transformation.

 

 

Book a demo

About The Author

#1 DevOps Platform for Salesforce

We build unstoppable teams by equipping DevOps professionals with the platform, tools and training they need to make release days obsolete. Work smarter, not longer.

Copado Launches Copado Explorer to Simplify and Streamline Testing on Salesforce
Exploring Top Cloud Automation Testing Tools
Master Salesforce DevOps with Copado Robotic Testing
Exploratory Testing vs. Automated Testing: Finding the Right Balance
A Guide to Salesforce Source Control
A Guide to DevOps Branching Strategies
Family Time vs. Mobile App Release Days: Can Test Automation Help Us Have Both?
How to Resolve Salesforce Merge Conflicts: A Guide
Copado Expands Beta Access to CopadoGPT for All Customers, Revolutionizing SaaS DevOps with AI
Is Mobile Test Automation Unnecessarily Hard? A Guide to Simplify Mobile Test Automation
From Silos to Streamlined Development: Tarun’s Tale of DevOps Success
Simplified Scaling: 10 Ways to Grow Your Salesforce Development Practice
What is Salesforce Incident Management?
What Is Automated Salesforce Testing? Choosing the Right Automation Tool for Salesforce
Copado Appoints Seasoned Sales Executive Bob Grewal to Chief Revenue Officer
Business Benefits of DevOps: A Guide
Copado Brings Generative AI to Its DevOps Platform to Improve Software Development for Enterprise SaaS
Celebrating 10 Years of Copado: A Decade of DevOps Evolution and Growth
Copado Celebrates 10 Years of DevOps for Enterprise SaaS Solutions
5 Reasons Why Copado = Less Divorces for Developers
What is DevOps? Build a Successful DevOps Ecosystem with Copado’s Best Practices
Scaling App Development While Meeting Security Standards
5 Data Deploy Features You Don’t Want to Miss
Top 5 Reasons I Choose Copado for Salesforce Development
How to Elevate Customer Experiences with Automated Testing
Getting Started With Value Stream Maps
Copado and nCino Partner to Provide Proven DevOps Tools for Financial Institutions
Unlocking Success with Copado: Mission-Critical Tools for Developers
How Automated Testing Enables DevOps Efficiency
How to Keep Salesforce Sandboxes in Sync
How to Switch from Manual to Automated Testing with Robotic Testing
Best Practices to Prevent Merge Conflicts with Copado 1 Platform
Software Bugs: The Three Causes of Programming Errors
How Does Copado Solve Release Readiness Roadblocks?
Why I Choose Copado Robotic Testing for my Test Automation
How to schedule a Function and Job Template in DevOps: A Step-by-Step Guide
Delivering Quality nCino Experiences with Automated Deployments and Testing
Best Practices Matter for Accelerated Salesforce Release Management
Maximize Your Code Quality, Security and performance with Copado Salesforce Code Analyzer
Upgrade Your Test Automation Game: The Benefits of Switching from Selenium to a More Advanced Platform
Three Takeaways From Copa Community Day
Cloud Native Applications: 5 Characteristics to Look for in the Right Tools
Using Salesforce nCino Architecture for Best Testing Results
How To Develop A Salesforce Testing Strategy For Your Enterprise
What Is Multi Cloud: Key Use Cases and Benefits for Enterprise Settings
5 Steps to Building a Salesforce Center of Excellence for Government Agencies
Salesforce UI testing: Benefits to Staying on Top of Updates
Benefits of UI Test Automation and Why You Should Care
Types of Salesforce Testing and When To Use Them
Copado + DataColada: Enabling CI/CD for Developers Across APAC
What is Salesforce API Testing and It Why Should Be Automated
Machine Learning Models: Adapting Data Patterns With Copado For AI Test Automation
Automated Testing Benefits: The Case For As Little Manual Testing As Possible
Beyond Selenium: Low Code Testing To Maximize Speed and Quality
UI Testing Best Practices: From Implementation to Automation
How Agile Test Automation Helps You Develop Better and Faster
Salesforce Test Cases: Knowing When to Test
DevOps Quality Assurance: Major Pitfalls and Challenges
11 Characteristics of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) That Set Them Apart
7 Key Compliance Regulations Relating to Data Storage
7 Ways Digital Transformation Consulting Revolutionizes Your Business
6 Top Cloud Security Trends
API Management Best Practices
Applying a Zero Trust Infrastructure in Kubernetes
Building a Data Pipeline Architecture Based on Best Practices Brings the Biggest Rewards
CI/CD Methodology vs. CI/CD Mentality: How to Meet Your Workflow Goals
DevOps to DevSecOps: How to Build Security into the Development Lifecycle
DevSecOps vs Agile: It’s Not Either/Or
How to Create a Digital Transformation Roadmap to Success
Infrastructure As Code: Overcome the Barriers to Effective Network Automation
Leveraging Compliance Automation Tools to Mitigate Risk
Moving Forward with These CI/CD Best Practices
Top 3 Data Compliance Challenges of Tomorrow and the Solutions You Need Today
Top 6 Cloud Security Management Policies and Procedures to Protect Your Business
What are the Benefits of Principle of Least Privilege (POLP) for My Organization?
You Can’t Measure What You Can’t See: Getting to know the 4 Metrics of Software Delivery Performance
How the Public Sector Can Continue to Accelerate Modernization
Building an Automated Test Framework to Streamline Deployments
How To Implement a Compliance Testing Methodology To Exceed Your Objectives
Cloud Security: Advantages and Disadvantages to Accessibility
Copado Collaborates with IBM to Accelerate Digital Transformation Projects on the Salesforce Platform
Continuous Quality: The missing link to DevOps maturity
Why Empowering Your Salesforce CoE is Essential for Maximizing ROI
Value Stream Management: The Future of DevOps at Scale is Here
Is Salesforce Development ‘One Size Fits All?’
The 3 Pillars of DevOps Value Stream Management
Gartner Recommends Companies Adopt Value Stream Delivery Platforms To Scale DevOps
The Admin's Quick Glossary for Understanding Salesforce DevOps
Top 10 Copado Features for #AwesomeAdmins
10 Secrets Management Tools to Facilitate Stronger Security Practices
5 Cloud Security Compliance Basics to Prevent Data Breaches
5 Data Security Management Fundamentals
Cloud Agnostic vs Cloud Native: Developing a Hybrid Approach
Making DIE Model Security vs. the CIA Security Triad Complementary, Not Competitive
The CI/CD Pipeline: Why Testing Is Required at Every Stage
DevSecOps Roadmap: From Architecture to Automation
Pets vs. Cattle: More Than an Analogy for Modern Infrastructures
Data Compliance Solutions Provide Greater Control Over Enterprise Data
Copado Cares: Free Training, Collaboration and Product Access for Global Response to COVID-19
12 Types of Social Engineering Attacks to Look Out For
Go back to resources
There is no previous posts
Go back to resources
There is no next posts
Ready to Transform Your Software Delivery Process?

Explore more about

No items found.