Key DevOps components are Continuous Planning, Continuous Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Communication and Collaboration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Feedback. Understanding these components and how they can work is essential to reap all the benefits the methodology can provide for startups and large enterprises.
Generally, implementing DevOps in software development projects can lead to better product quality, improved resource optimization, increased transparency, better collaboration, and faster delivery. That is why learning more about the methodology helps understand multiple applications of DevOps for beginners and large businesses.
For example, the DevOps market size is estimated to reach $70 billion by 2032, compared to $8 billion in 2022. This rapidly growing DevOps market provides a room of opportunity for businesses to build a revenue-driven product by increasing the efficiency of their development projects with a value-driven approach.
In this article, you can get more industry insights about DevOps, its components, and how they can improve the effectiveness of development projects.
What is DevOps and How it Works?
DevOps is a software development methodology created to accelerate development by increasing its efficiency with an iterative approach to improve the quality and value of the final product. This methodology incorporates automation in development and improves communication/collaboration to speed up product delivery.
Its effective implementation can often require DevOps consulting services since it is a sequential process where every phase of development follows an iterative protocol to ensure the execution of strategies meets quality requirements and leads to a lucrative product.
7 Key Components of DevOps
Understanding how these components can work in projects is the key to learning how to implement DevOps in multiple development strategies.
Continuous Planning
Continuous planning is the initial phase in DevOps that focuses on project planning driven by quality, innovation, adaptability, and frequent reevaluation and planning. In simple words, it means the team must regularly evaluate the project planning strategy to identify weak/ineffective factors and improve the development process.
It prevents a scenario where the team gets inside an unproductive comfort zone created by following a predetermined plan. Continuous planning prevents this by requiring frequent reevaluation of the development planning strategy and keeps the team actively productive.
Continuous Development
Continuous development is a multi-phase process involving various components like integration, testing, delivery, review, and feedback. Its goal is to improve product quality and development strategy through iterative development, delivery, testing, and feedback, which helps the team formulate an error-free and quality-centric development process. The iterative development approach helps businesses build a product that offers user-driven value and can outperform the competition.
Continuous Integration
Continue Integration is a phase where developers identify bugs/errors, accelerate release, and improve product quality by merging the integration of code changes in a central repository to run automated builds and tests. This phase involves highly technical processes like integration testing and code reviews to ensure the software code meets quality standards and runs smoothly. The interactive approach in continuous integration ensures that the final code of every software release is without any bugs, flaws, or errors.
Continuous Communication and Collaboration
Productive communication and collaboration are the keys that can guarantee a value-driven product and lucrative outcome for any project. DevOps regulates communication and collaboration by incorporating automation in software development and delivery, making it essential for every team member to communicate/collaborate every day.
In short, the quality-centric and iterative approach of DevOps requires every development team member to collaborate and communicate frequently to understand/reevaluate the project goals, share and review results, and work towards the same goals.
This type of continuous collaboration reduces errors in the development process, improves productivity, and helps meet expectations through a quality product.
Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is a quality assurance phase in DevOps that helps identify all the bugs, errors, and UI/UX design issues through iterative testing. The process includes manual, automated, penetration, security, performance, and user acceptance testing, depending on business goals and market requirements. Continuous testing helps evaluate a product/software thoroughly since the iterative approach ensures that the team deals with all the design and performance issues, bugs, or errors.
The DevOps methodology makes continuous testing mandatory for businesses to enable the development of a value and user-centric product. It is why many giants like Amazon and Netflix incorporate DevOps into their processes.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a subset of every development phase, including development, integration, and testing. Only with the smooth execution of the Continuous delivery phase can every other (like continuous development, testing, and feedback) run without interruptions. This phase includes automated development, testing, and delivery of the software code to speed up review, improvement, and product deployment.
The process involves various protocols like UI testing, integration testing, API reliability testing, and load testing. It enables multiple/faster testing cycles, automated and manual reviews, feedback, and final product improvements.
Continuous Feedback and Improvements
Frequent evaluation, testing and review, feedback, and improvements are necessary to ensure the final product can meet business goals and the expectations of clients, stakeholders, and the development team. Continuous feedback and improvement come after development, testing, and deliveries.
The continuous feedback phase includes a review process where:
QA engineers test the software to identify and remove bugs/errors, ensure UI/UX design meets quality standards, and evaluate and implement better software security.
The client, stakeholders, project manager, and development team review the performance, functionality, and UI/UX design by running the software or getting a real customer to use the software (User acceptance testing (UAT)).
They record all the performance/functionality results, reviews, and feedback from everyone on where improvements are necessary and how to execute them.
The development team then incorporates the feedback, test results, and reviews to conduct the continuous development, integration, testing, and feedback and improvement phase again, ensuring the final product meets all quality standards and expectations.
Conclusion
Unlike a traditional sequential method, all DevOps components/phases have a symbiotic relationship with every other phase in the methodology. A phase can run smoothly only if each phase in DevOps runs smoothly as well. For example, the team cannot conduct continuous testing without continuous development, delivery, and feedback. Similarly, they cannot execute Continuous development without testing, feedback, and improvement requirements.
However, all a business owner (startup or large enterprise) should know is that the benefits of DevOps methodology far outweigh the complexities in its process. And hiring a DevOps expert can help simplify, plan, and manage the process effectively.