8 Best Practices for Managing DevOps Projects
Tags: devops, career, productivity
Published: 2019-06-10 09:28:13

DevOps is spread everywhere throughout the software industry. The hype is real for DevOps and it should be too, as DevOps simplifies and speeds up the development process. The situation is such that most of the leading tech companies cannot imagine their workflow without DevOps in 2019. It has become an integral part of an organization's internal IT structure.


This high demand for DevOps has increased the demand for DevOps engineers in the market too. Experienced DevOps engineers don’t really need to look for jobs right now, they get an interview call from some new company at least once a month (given that they have a good online portfolio). But only the well experienced and skillful DevOps engineers are pursued further by most companies as they are the ones who know best practices for managing DevOps projects.


The right skills help build the right process of DevOps for a project. These skills are acquired over time but there are some best practices that every DevOps engineer should have the know-how of, which we will discuss below.

When becoming a DevOps engineer or even a developer of any kind, a person should always remain curious as to what more can be done to accomplish the same task in a more elegant way. This skill is crucial in the IT industry and most DevOps engineers already know this, doesn’t matter if they have taken the <a href="https://www.devopsu.org/certifications/">best DevOps certification</a> or not, this kind of skills develop over time. Although it is also important for a DevOps engineer to have some kind of DevOps certification.

<strong>8 Best Practices for managing projects in DevOps</strong>

The main goal of DevOps is to make the development process faster and more reliable with less overhead. Automation is the key to success in any DevOps implementation, this includes automated testing before deployment.

Here are 8 best practices for managing DevOps projects.

<ol>
 	<li><strong>Automation from the beginning</strong>
One of the main focus areas of DevOps is automation. A good DevOps process heavily relies on continuous integration and continuous deployment. As in any project that is following agile development, there are numerous changes that need to be deployed or released very frequently. A large number of code changes are pushed every day. It is essential to have some kind of automation in place here so that this process is not done manually. You can learn this by acquiring an <a href="https://www.devopsu.org/training/certifications/agile.html">Agile certification training</a> online or by watching YouTube videos or consulting an expert.</li>
 	<li><strong>A solid testing strategy
</strong>Before deployment, each chunk of code needs to be tested. Tests of the same type or similar functionalities are grouped into test cases which are written by the developers themselves. A definition of the right kind of tests should also be provided by the DevOps engineer as a part of the testing strategy. Having a clear testing strategy from the beginning helps vanish major future bugs. Deployment of any new feature only occurs after all test cases and individual tests are passed.</li>
 	<li><strong>Focus on collaborative teamwork</strong>
DevOps is all about collaboration of all parties that are involved throughout the development phase. As the word, DevOps itself is a collaboration of two words development and operations. This highlights the importance of collaboration in a DevOps project. The individual teams and the client, all need to be in sync in order to achieve a successful DevOps workflow.</li>
 	<li><strong>Using the right tools</strong>
The right kind of tools should be used for deployment, development, and testing. Every single project differs in term of what tools need to be used. There are some common tools like the code editor and online repository management tool which might be the same across various projects. But in-depth every project itself is unique with some unique features. These features need to be understood before any development takes place, and keeping them in mind the right kind of tools for a particular project must be decided.</li>
 	<li><strong>Application monitoring
</strong>In rare conditions, the application crashes unexpectedly. Mostly, this has nothing to do with a fault in the code, rather it is just some overlooked edge case. Everyone is familiar with the blue screen in Windows OS that reads “something went wrong”. Microsoft is a multibillion-dollar company, if it can happen to them, it can happen to you. The best approach in this scenario is to have some kind of application monitoring in place, which lets you know instantly whenever a key feature of the app or the whole app crashes.</li>
 	<li><strong>Birds-eye view of the project (Dashboard)</strong>
In larger projects where there are a lot of things to be done and a lot of people involved in making them, things tend to cluster. Without a proper dashboard to manage each individual task, the whole project will become mayhem. It is really important to have a birds-eye view of the whole project at a glance to see what is in progress, what needs to be done and where the team is getting stuck. An example of such a task and resources managing dashboard is Jira. Jira is used in most companies as the primary task management software. Although some companies make their own dashboards for management.</li>
 	<li><strong>Reduce overhead
</strong>Overhead is the added time that could be reduced. In software development, if you are not following the agile process than there is a lot of overhead, like having meetings after deployment/release to gather new requirements, getting a response from the testing team, etc. Agile development reduces this overhead to a limit than the DevOps comes into play and reduces it even further. DevOps some concepts of automation and continuity that reduces overhead to a great extent. In DevOps, it is the job of the DevOps engineers to find and reduce overhead where ever they can.</li>
 	<li><strong>Getting reviews
</strong>Getting reviews from both the development team and the client creates a bond between all parties involved in the software development process. Reviews help clear misunderstanding between the client and the development team and also reduces the chance of wasted effort if requirements weren't understood properly. It is always better in DevOps projects to get reviews after small changes so that any irregularity or misconception doesn't lead to a massive bug or lack of functionality.</li>
</ol>