5 Steps to DevOps Success

Copado’s Five Steps to DevOps Success are built to solve the everyday pain experienced by modern cloud teams. Each step offers a prescriptive — yet adaptable — playbook teams can follow to build a strong DevOps practice from the ground up and become a digital disruptor.

Visibility

You can’t deliver business success without an end-to-end view of plans, changes, environments and performance. Situational awareness gives you the insight you need to improve.

Quality

A 360 view of your current state will likely reveal quality gaps. Shift-left testing bakes quality and compliance into the entire process — reducing change failure rates and time-to-recover from defects.

Speed

A firm foundation of visibility and quality lets teams move faster. Automating manual processes and eliminating downtime ramps up deployment frequency and time-to-value.

Innovation

You’ve mastered fast and friction-free deployments — and now it’s time to optimize for impact and ROI. Fast feedback loops, adoption monitoring and effective prioritization unlock your potential for innovation.

Resilience

Digital disruptors adapt and pivot as business needs change. Resilient teams are laser-focused on continuous improvement, self-correction and experimentation.

Gauge Your Risk Profile

How high can you fly? Your organization’s risk tolerance plays a massive role in your innovation strategy. The five risk profiles in DevOps are: Entrant, Competitor, Contender, Leader, Disruptor.

To begin unlocking DevOps ROI, you need to understand where you’re at on the risk-to-innovation scale — and where you want to be. A clear understanding enables you to ramp up your innovation without ramping up the risk.

Why Is DevOps Visibility Important?

Modern software development is more complex than ever — a single enterprise project can have dozens of stakeholders and hundreds of APIs. Without visibility, gleaning insights and troubleshooting issues is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And that’s why it’s our First Step to DevOps Success.

Visibility Best Practices

• Adopt Version Control. Version control automatically tracks code changes. Updates are recorded in a centralized log for developers and stakeholders to reference and roll back changes.
• Connect User Stories and Metadata. Syncing changes in version control to user stories gives you a sweeping story that covers the who, what, where, when and why.
• Organize the Architecture. Noisy metadata can obscure architecture visibility. Shine a light on your architecture by organizing it into folders and packages.
• Sync the Cloud Stack. Cloud-native DevOps provides visibility into Multi-Cloud tech stacks and ties them together.
• Map Value Streams. Visualize workflows to locate bottlenecks, eliminate waste and focus on your strongest value drivers.
• Leverage Four Key DevOps Metrics. Gauge your performance based on lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate and time to restore.

Why Is DevOps Quality Important?

The global pace of innovation demands end-to-end quality built directly into your DevOps pipeline. Modern teams must shift both left and right to bake testing into the entire development cycle — from deployment to live in-production UX tests. Most important of all: your testing should be automated.

Build Your Test Automation Toolkit

Follow our checklist of recommended features for your future software test automation strategy.

• Low-code or no-code functionality. Lower the barrier for anyone to create and execute tests without years of coding experience.
• Intelligent automation. Intelligent automation can report potential defects, take automatic screenshots of errors and predict the quality of upcoming releases.
• End-to-end integration. Make sure the automation solution you choose is built to support each of the applications your business relies on.

Why Is DevOps Speed Important?

If teams can’t bring both quality and speed to the table, they’ll be bogged down by an endless number of manual processes and shifting priorities. To stay competitive in this race for innovation, companies must automate deployments to drive development velocity and stop wasting valuable time. An end-to-end CI/CD process lets you proactively address conflicts, automate manual tasks and templatize pipelines.

Combining the Power of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

The mission of CI is to run a fast set of tests for each change to confirm nothing broke. But work delivered to production must navigate a battery of comprehensive tests to make sure it meets every functional and structural requirement. Teams that practice both CI and CD have the ability to:

• Optimize version control branching for speed and clarity.
• Auto-resolve merge conflicts and auto-apply manual resolutions.
• Fully or partially automate deployments.
• Deploy small changes to production every day.
• Quickly create and refresh environments — and keep them in sync.

Why Is DevOps Innovation Important?

What happens when you combine low-code platforms with DevOps strategy and CI/CD best practices? You create the conditions for a culture of innovation. Tools don’t create culture — but they can lay the groundwork for new processes and foster new ways of thinking. By reinforcing your DevOps practice with iterative processes and an innovation-first culture, you can achieve better outcomes and maximize ROI.

Automation: The Secret Sauce of Innovation

Architecting the DevOps pipeline with automation that supports CI/CD helps teams execute two tasks: Complex data merges and conflict flagging. Automation can also help you achieve a shorter feedback cycle to make sure the features you’re developing are on track and on target. More automated feedback gives teams the confidence to make the right strategic decisions.

Automation can also help you prioritize work by value rather than a “first in, first out” approach. All customer requests are not created equal — and prioritization can improve customer satisfaction.

Why Is DevOps Resilience Important?

Change is necessary for survival in today’s hyperspeed world — and experimentation is the driver of change. Resilient DevOps teams leverage an agile culture that adapts and self-optimizes in real-time as their business needs evolve. They relentlessly search for better ways to resolve organizational challenges. Resilient organizations are reliable, consistent and compliant — all while reaping the benefits of faster release cycles and end-to-end digital transformation.

Attributes of Resilient DevOps Teams

• Decentralization
• Agile Processes
• Data-Driven Testing
• Automated Failure Resolution

Now It’s Your Turn

At Copado, everything we do is centered around this step-by-step DevOps framework. Across the globe, our teams enable these capabilities for teams and accelerate their DevOps maturity.

Now it’s your turn. How can you apply these principles to your team and your work?