Today, businesses must adopt changes and implement them to survive and grow in a highly volatile market at the earliest in their organisations. Interestingly, small-scale companies or start-ups in the United Kingdom can easily adapt to these changes, while large-scale enterprises may face difficulties in adapting and implementing these changes.But, it is inevitable for businesses of all sizes to adapt to the new trends of digital transformation and DevOps methodologies to beat the competition.

To achieve a seamless DevOps transformation in their enterprise and gain significant results, businesses in the UK should follow specific steps. Even before highlighting the DevOps transformation steps, let us understand about DevOps methodology.

What is DevOps Transformation?

DevOps is an evolution from agile methodology and is an enterprise transformation approach. It aims to break traditional silos that earlier existed between cross-functional teams. This methodology brings the developer teams, operation teams, QA teams together. It puts individuals, processes, and products together to help organisations release high-quality software faster than the earlier traditional approaches. DevOps transformation is said to play a key role in achieving successful digital transformation for today’s enterprises.

What does enterprise DevOps Transformation mean?

Enterprise DevOps transformation is a process wherein enterprises reshape their organisational strategy and bring positive cultural change by implementing DevOps practices and breaking traditional silos. DevOps processes with CI, continuous testing, and continuous delivery results in improving business processes and ensures faster software delivery.

DevOps practices are combined with advanced technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to bring more agility in teams and speed up the software delivery process in the enterprises DevOps transformation journey.

Seven-Step approach for Enterprise DevOps Transformation in the UK

1. Plan strategically as a first key step

Before starting the agile and DevOps transformation process, it is essential to prepare a DevOps transformation plan. The plan should cover all aspects of the transformation journey and guide teams to move ahead in the transformation process.  

At this stage, it is essential to ensure that the goals and objectives of the transformation are communicated across the organisation; teams should be assured of management support in the challenges ahead, and transparency across teams. Securing and gaining trust from individuals is critical for the success of the DevOps transformation process as it considerably reduces the chances of resistance.

2. Establish DevOps Centre of Excellence (DCoE)

DevOps Centre of Excellence (DCoE) is a shared platform where DevOps practitioners share their experiences and learn from each other. The DevOps CoE must include representatives from all delivery teams and vendor organisations. It should be led by an enterprise leader who has support from all levels in the organisation. It is preferred to have an experienced external partner to conduct the initial phases of CoE. This DevOps transformation takes a time of 12-24 months to ensure the complete transition.

3. Build a culture of learning and collaboration in the enterprise

DevOps brings a change in the business processes, and the organisational culture is more prone to resistance from employees. This sudden change can also cause some temporary strain to some parts of the business. Still, it can effectively be addressed by building a culture of inclusion, boosting the morale of individuals & teams, and ensuring collaboration between teams. It is more likely that with agile and DevOps transformation, practitioner’s roles and responsibilities will change. Thus, teams should be provided with an ideal organisational culture and learning environment that empowers them and fosters a collaborative environment. However, businesses must note that cultural change has to happen from the top down.

4. Set up DevOps KPIs and governing mechanism

At this stage, organisation must streamline their business processes, align communication channels to achieve successful DevOps transformation. Enterprises must establish DevOps Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to govern the culture of the enterprise.

The organisational culture typically needs effective governance, and this is where governing principles come into the picture. Governing principles or DevOps KPIs ensures safe and effective DevOps transformation. Enterprises must set the roles and responsibilities of DevOps practitioners, share awareness about team collaboration to empower teams.

5. Conduct workshops for scrum teams

This step plays a vital role in the DevOps transformation journey. It is essential to conduct workshops for the scrum teams with the help of subject matter experts (SMEs) to ensure the right sizing of tools and processes. At this stage, enterprises must look at their existing tools and technologies to identify which tools will work for the organisation, and action can be taken accordingly. Further, this step also ensures that selecting tools, accelerators, and methods is more purposeful and help teams realize the DevOps goals. As the DevOps process moves, the intake process can be altered based on the need and further evolved according to the needs and feedback from experts.

6. Run the pilot program and compare results with KPIs

At this stage, the DevOps practitioners identify the right applications and domains to apply DevOps practices. The identified portfolio should be such that it can be scaled up to the enterprise level. The right way to execute this step is to apply the pilot projects according to the domains of the development process.

Ensure that all the details needed to run an end-to-end process such as toolset, personnel, manual, and automated testing processes are all set ready. Run the pilot test and compare results with KPIs to measure the level of success.

7. Gather feedback and scale-out DevOps program

The last and final step is to gather feedback from the pilot tests’ metrics and scale them through multiple releases across different application portfolios. Since DevOps is not a one-time process, it is essential to ensure continuous feedback, optimisation, and continuous deployment throughout the DevOps transformation journey.

Conclusion

Digital transformation and DevOps have become the core elements for today’s enterprises in the United Kingdom. DevOps practices have completely reinvented the way businesses deliver the product to the customer enabling a great user experience. With the help of DevOps, enterprises can deliver high-quality products to the customer faster than ever. However, it is quite challenging for enterprises to completely transform their existing business processes and adopt DevOps.

Therefore, to ensure a successful DevOps transformation process, enterprises should build effective DevOps transformation strategy, follow step-wise DevOps transformation approaches, and lay out a proper DevOps transformation roadmap. Businesses in the UK must seek the help of DevOps transformation services providers to start their DevOps transformation journey and achieve quality results tailored for the UK market.

The post A Seven-Step Approach to Enterprise DevOps Transformation first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content 1.  9 Best Practices for DevOps Transformation  1.1  Align goals with business objectives  1.2  Maximize the usage of automation tools and technology  1.3  Monitor continuously CI/CD pipelines  1.4  Measure DevOps performance continuously  1.5  Focus on the continuous feedback mechanism  1.6  Monitor proactively production environment  1.7  Go serverless to reap maximum benefits  1.8  Focus on end-user experience  1.9  Time-to-market is critical 2.  Conclusion 3.  Our DevOps Consulting & Implementation services

As the world is moving towards digital transformation, competition among enterprises and businesses is rising at a fast pace. Enterprises of all sizes (small, medium, and large-sized) are trying to figure out innovative ways and leverage the latest IT technology and software development methodologies to stay ahead of the competition. One such that has taken the software development life cycle (SDLC) altogether to a new shift is the most widely used agile & DevOps practices.

Typically, for enterprises to become digital-first, adopting DevOps best practices by using continuous integration and continuous delivery of software is the best and fastest way to achieve faster releases and go-to-market early.

The DevOps practices foster increased collaboration between development and operation teams, thus ensuring a better environment for faster releases as Continuous Integration (CI)  and Continuous Development (CD) go hand-in-hand with the CI/CD pipelines enabled.  Although many enterprises have gained immense benefits after adopting DevOps, the key to success lies in the correct implementation of DevOps practices.

Below mentioned are 9 best practices for DevOps transformation that you should consider if you are thinking of embarking on the DevOps journey.

9 Best Practices for DevOps Transformation

1. Align goals with business objectives:

People, process, and tools are three pillars that play a major role in the DevOps processes and for a successful DevOps transformation, enterprises should first identify the right stakeholders who should be involved in the process. Then identification of the right automation tools is required and then finally the processes of the enterprise should be aligned such that it matches with the objective and goals of your business.

However, it is essential to keep your stakeholders who are involved to be aware and make them get aligned in the development processes. It is a must to take necessary inputs from them and timely gather information on challenges if any for DevOps transformations.

2. Maximize the usage of automation tools and technology:

To successfully embark on a digital transformation journey, enterprises should make maximum usage of automation tools and technologies. Automation is a basic requirement for DevOps and is embedded in DevOps processes to ensure faster releases to ensure faster time-to-market. Moreover, test automation starts from the code generation stage and continues till the monitoring stage of the DevOps processes.

There are a lot of DevOps automation tools available in the market that enterprises can leverage. These automation tools help organizations to deploy applications in a much faster and efficient manner. Automation ensures accuracy, consistency, reliability, and increases the number of releases such that more features are delivered in lesser time.

3. Monitor continuously CI/CD pipelines:

Continuous monitoring of CI/CD pipelines is very important for successful enterprise DevOps transformations. Continuous monitoring helps in quick failure identification and there are many DevOps monitoring, DevOps alerting, and DevOps visualization tools that enterprises can leverage. Most of the DevOps monitoring tools work well for every infrastructure like cloud, containerized, and on-premise therefore, it ensures a smooth DevOps transformation process.

Effective use of the DevOps monitoring tools will create an efficient and strong monitoring ecosystem and will enable teams to improve the software product’s quality.

4. Measure DevOps performance continuously:

The ultimate objective of DevOps is to deliver faster to production. Therefore to validate whether or not this objective is being met, it is important to measure DevOps performance.

The four key metrics namely Lead time, Deployment frequency, Failure Rate, and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) must be carefully monitored by enterprises to assess overall DevOps performance. These metrics altogether help determine the team’s software delivery performance and DevOps teams can experiment with the approach and can measure the impact using these performance-based metrics. These metrics push teams to focus on collaboration to achieve a common goal.

5. Focus on the continuous feedback mechanism:

Today, many enterprises are struggling to provide such software that satisfies their customer and for this, the software should be customer-centric. But how will enterprises know whether the deployed software is meeting customer expectations or not?

DevOps typically is enabled by a continuous feedback mechanism and as teams work collaboratively,  various stakeholders such as product owners, QA teams, developers, and operations teams get the required information faster.

6. Monitor proactively production environment:

Enterprises need to ensure that once their teams have written the code, tested it, built it and their software gets ready to release for production, the production environment should be made ready for the release.

Evidently, if the production environment is not ready, it might act as a barrier to the success of the DevOps transformation process. Therefore, it is essential to check the preparedness of the production environment and must keep a check on the firewall configurations, backups and disaster recovery, security controls, physical and remote access, etc.

7. Go serverless to reap maximum benefits:

To realize the highest potential of DevOps, enterprises should adopt serverless infrastructure. Serverless architecture helps developers and operations teams to pay more attention to building and deploying apps instead of infrastructure management as more operations and management tasks get handled by the serverless providers.

There are various tools such as Google Cloud, AWS Lambda, Azure functions, etc. that enterprises can leverage to successfully run application code on serverless infrastructures to meet the needs of various DevOps organizations.

8. Focus on end-user experience:

Once the application is deployed it will interact with existing and new systems and therefore, make sure you keep track and focus on the end-user experience. The success of your application or service is determined by the satisfaction of these end users only. Hence, it is essential to interact with end-users at every step of the way which means after the deployment stage also and not just at the ideation or development phase.

It is essential to evaluate and understand the issues faced by users to know about their priorities which should be valued. Use this knowledge to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and continuous feedback throughout the DevOps toolchain to deliver a great customer experience with high-quality solutions.

9. Time-to-market is critical:

Today’s businesses need faster and quality releases for which embracing DevOps methodology helps in going to market faster. As software evolves, new features should be released to market more frequently, and DevOps CI/CD processes along with leveraging the latest automation tools helps with faster releases and ensures to go-to-market faster.

Conclusion:

As enterprises move ahead in their DevOps transformation journey, they must remember that DevOps is not an overnight process, rather it requires a long-term commitment. The success of DevOps lies in the right way of implementation and this can be achieved by following certain best practices as mentioned in this blog. To get strategic DevOps implementation, leverage our next-gen DevOps consulting and implementation services

Our DevOps Consulting & Implementation services

• Helps to implement optimized software development processes to optimize application delivery

• Ensures teams to develop quality software with assured faster releases

• Delivers improved code with better team collaboration which leads to faster time-to-production

• Ensures code quality assessments along with code security

• Delivers a pragmatic approach to your DevOps adoption

• Improves business bottom line with well-defined automation in place

• Cost optimization is assured with reduced operational costs

• Brings you best practices from the industry for successful DevOps implementations

The post 9 Best Practices for A Successful DevOps Transformation first appeared on TestingXperts.