What to Avoid When Considering DevOps Transformation
Tags: devops, devopstransformation
Published: 2021-02-19 11:14:40



DevOps isn’t a new concept — it has been in the market for over a decade now. Companies have realized the benefits of adopting DevOps. While businesses are considering DevOps integral for agile development, they are still facing challenges in fully leveraging its capabilities.

**Major DevOps Benefits**

1. Reduced costs
2. Greater competencies
3. Better communication and cooperation opportunities
4. Fast and innovative development cycle

> State of DevOps report by Puppet found that high performing DevOps teams could deploy code 100 times faster, fail three times less and recover 24 times faster than low performing teams.

Understanding and managing the entire DevOps process is not easy as it requires collective effort and time. Many firms fail to consider that DevOps is not merely a practice but a cultural change, which leads to DevOps adoption failure. This ultimately results in the company sidelining the approach entirely. In this blog, we will discuss a few common mistakes that businesses should avoid in order to achieve transformational change with DevOps.

**Focusing on Too Many Tools**
DevOps, certainly, is a complex process. Therefore, to simplify it, there are several tools available in the market. However, the greater the number of tools, the more confusion they can create. Hence, it is not advisable to focus on leveraging a bunch of tools. It will be difficult for you to select from a variety of options as different teams would want to use different tools. An organizational process on hand proves to be the right answer in this scenario.

Instead of trying different tools and wasting time to see which tool fits perfectly for your requirements, it is feasible to align your goals with the results provided by the tools that you will select. Get your DevOps needs ready and seek the right tools that can solve your purpose. It is possible that you might end up using multiple tools for different DevOps processes. However, an agnostic approach will help you to choose the right tools that fulfill your requirements. Also, while you choose multiple tools, you need to utilize them to their full potential to ensure smooth DevOps adoption and cost-efficiency.

**Believing That Faster Means More Valuable**
Many companies leverage DevOps just to increase the pace of their software development process. In order to achieve faster time-to-market, which is one of the key benefits of DevOps, businesses don’t realize other important aspects of DevOps and tend to focus on speeding up the process.

DevOps is a lean process that allows you to deliver products more frequently. However, your entire focus should not be on faster development. Continuous development and improvement should also be taken into consideration. This leads to our next mistake.

**Lack of Continuous Improvement**
Getting the product ready as soon as possible should not be your only priority — providing a better-quality product should be. Hence, continuous improvement is necessary to develop a product that meets your customers’ expectations and market standards.

You need to find better ways to improve or reduce steps that add no value. However, this will require some amount of effort and investment. Getting constant feedback allows you to inspect, reflect, and enhance your software. Including continuous improvement steps in your development journey helps you to enhance not just the final product, but also improves every individual step of the DevOps process.

**Not Preparing for Culture Change**
With the right tools for DevOps practices come new challenges. The key challenge is to make your teams use those tools for faster development and continuous improvement, as well as automated testing and monitoring. Your organization should be ready for this cultural change.

The transition from traditional tools and methods to DevOps practices is going to be difficult. Hence, it is important to plan the shift, strategize every move, and then gradually adapt to the change. As DevOps is a combination of development and operations, make sure that both these teams get proper experience and knowledge before fully shifting to DevOps methodology.

**Not Using Proper Automation**
It is essential that testing is done before pushing the software in the final production environment, which is followed by offering the product to customers. Market demands quality products, which asks for continuous testing at every stage before the release. This requires a lot of time and effort. Hence, automated testing comes in handy in such situations.

End-to-end DevOps automation is required to scale the development process and assure a quality product. This also allows rapid development. Hence, testing should not be carried out for only CI and CD pipelines, but it should also be automated for better and faster results. This eliminates the need for any manual assistance that is prone to errors. It can include difficult integrations that need additional management and in multiple format deployments.

Listen to or read our Podcast on the Evolution of DevOps in 2021 to get more insights on how automation can boost the development process.

**Incorrect Metrics to Measure Project Success**
The entire shift to DevOps turns into failure if faster delivery comes at the cost of quality. Companies should get an in-depth understanding of the right metrics that show correct project growth and success. Make realistic estimates and create a plan to successfully reach your end goal. It is essential to consider metrics that align goals, timelines, and quality with success.

**Adopting DevOps the Right Way!**
By overcoming the challenges mentioned in this blog, you can ensure a successful [DevOps implementation] (https://www.softwebsolutions.com/resources/implementing-devops-for-enterprise.html). With the right DevOps practices, you can achieve agility, increased productivity, quality products, faster time to market, and improved customer satisfaction. The first step towards adopting DevOps is to get an in-depth understanding of the entire process. 
https://bit.ly/3aAYLmC