Understanding What Makes DevOps Release Management Unique

DevOps culture is holistic and involves looking at every piece of a value stream and optimizing it. The DevOps philosophy seeks to eliminate silos or individual teams working in isolation. As a result, businesses that embrace the DevOps culture improve the transparency of their end-to-end operations. This goes against the grain of many established businesses, where individuals and teams have distinct roles and responsibilities with little cross-collaboration, if any.

The DevOps philosophy is about collective responsibility, encouraging IT personnel to work toward finding solutions promptly, along with remaining committed to lifelong learning. Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis, authors of The DevOps Handbook, outline these tenets in their book. Employees should be able to spend the majority of their time perfecting DevOps-related tasks such as infrastructure automation, network security, application monitoring...

DevOps is holistic

DevOps initiatives are holistic, as opposed to the isolated strategies of the past. DevOps considers the entire value stream and all of the individuals involved, rather than simply one person or a specific component of it. We’re turning the traditional model on its head by designing our systems and procedures around our people. This is the reason why elite-performing DevOps teams can demonstrate a correlation between investment in information technology and financial performance. The underlying objective of these investments is in the growth and empowerment of individuals, enabling them to enhance processes and choose suitable technologies for themselves. Empowering your workforce directly correlates to strengthening your productivity and making your company resilient.

The field of DevOps has undergone significant expansion, extending its scope beyond the mere processes of release and deployment. At the time of writing, it encompasses various stakeholders...

DevOps integrates CI/CD, QA, security, and feedback

DevOps is an umbrella term of techniques that eliminate communication barriers between the software development and operations teams to improve product delivery, speed, and quality. The software must match the requirements and expectations of its end users and stakeholders, which is why quality assurance (QA) is an essential aspect of DevOps. However, incorporating QA into DevOps workflows can be difficult because it necessitates a change in mentality, company culture, and software.

Critically, you must establish quality targets and key performance indicators (KPIs) before developing a DevOps testing pipeline. The importance of knowing your KPIs cannot be overstated; each unique business has its own. Aligning quality objectives with business objectives and customer needs is a challenge for any company. Share your quality objectives with your staff and other interested parties to best determine what you want to accomplish in terms...

DevOps incorporates business teams into the development process

The term DevOps refers to more than simply the technical procedures and tools that allow you to consistently deploy your applications into production – it goes well beyond that in scope. As mentioned previously, it is a comprehensive strategy in which the entirety of the organization needs to recognize the legitimacy of the DevOps methodology. To ensure that DevOps is incorporated into every project, it is necessary for sales and marketing to make it an inherent component of their workflows, and it must be treated seriously. Similarly, it is important to place effective DevOps practices across a wide variety of departments. This ensures that subsequent teammates who take ownership of the project in the future have an established framework to operate within.

DevOps principles should be represented throughout all stages of a product’s lifespan, from development to maintenance. These principles take into...

The three ways of DevOps

The three ways of DevOps, from Gene Kim’s book, The DevOps Handbook, encompass three fundamental concepts that articulate the tenets and philosophies that guide the processes, procedures, practices, and prescriptive measures necessary for an organization to effectively embrace the DevOps culture and implement the necessary changes. If your organization is new to DevOps, the three ways of DevOps offers a great starting place because they are philosophical and non-technical.

The first way – flow/systems thinking

Attention is paid to the performance of a whole system rather than the performance of a particular silo of work or department. This can be a large division such as development or IT operations, or it can be as small as a single contributor such as a site reliability engineer or software developer. The various revenue streams that are made feasible by information technology are emphasized prominently here. Notably, the creation of work...

How do traditional release management methodologies stack up against DevOps?

Planning large releases, which requires a greater amount of work and risk, is a common focus of traditional methodologies. Complexity often arises fast while working in longer cycles with fewer releases. In this setting, you will have strict deadlines and a laundry list of extras to meet. Big releases may be spectacular, but they are certainly an inefficient method of production. However, DevOps uses a different strategy; smaller releases are more manageable since they are simpler to comprehend and test. If things don’t go as planned, there is less damage to manage. Essentially, DevOps allows your company to quickly adapt to fluctuating client demands by enabling faster, lighter releases.

When it comes to managing any kind of development, traditional techniques commonly make use of planning and scheduling systems. Many moving parts are normally associated with a development cycle. This is especially...

A case study of how DocuSign transitioned from Agile to DevOps

DocuSign is a pioneer in electronic signatures and digital transaction management. Few innovations have had as much impact on the way agreements are made, signed, and managed as DocuSign in the age of digital transformation. The history of product management at DocuSign has been characterized by eliminating obstacles, inventing creative solutions, and constantly adapting to meet the constantly evolving expectations of its customers. This innovative company was founded by Tom Gonser, who paved the way for a solution that revolutionized global business practices.

In this case study, we’ll reveal how DocuSign transformed from an Agile business to a DevOps powerhouse.

The genesis of DocuSign

The tale of DocuSign started in the late 1990s, when Tom Gonser, a visionary entrepreneur and skilled software engineer, identified the shortcomings and complexities inherent in the conventional method of signing agreements...

Summary

This concludes Chapter 5. At this point, you have a firm grasp on the meaning of what makes DevOps release management unique. You learned how DevOps is a holistic practice, taking every component of a value stream into account while formulating solutions or improving the overall system. DevOps is unique in that it integrates CI/CD, QA, security, and feedback. Through the use of well-crafted, automated pipelines and a carefully selected patchwork of testing and approval processes, DevOps release management stands alone compared to other release management models. A critically important feature that is unique to the DevOps philosophy is incorporating business teams into the development process. You also explored the three ways of DevOps, a vitally important notion that was popularized by Gene Kim, author of The DevOps Handbook. At this point, you are well poised to distinguish traditional release management methodologies and DevOps ones.

In the next chapter, we will be reviewing...

Questions

Answer the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter:

1. What are the three ways of DevOps?
2. What does shift-left mean?
3. What are tight feedback loops and why are they important?
4. Why is eliminating silos or individual teams working in isolation necessary for the success of your organization?
5. What is DevSecOps?
6. Why are job designations such as DevOps engineer and director of DevOps a myth?
7. How can using DevOps release management minimize dependence on other teams?
8. What is crunch time and how does DevOps prevent it?
9. What is the primary objective of DevOps?
10. What is the significance of having a comprehensive tools integration platform?