DevOps has seen widespread adoption in recent years as organizations seek to accelerate technological innovation. The DevOps model integrates software development and system operations skill sets, enabling these teams to become more agile and customer-focused. It incorporates a set of practices and highly automated tools to accelerate application development and provide for the continuous delivery of high-quality software.
Misaligned Processes and Toolsets Are Hampering DevOps Initiatives
Misaligned Processes and Toolsets Are Hampering DevOps Initiatives
However, a new report from Puppet finds that 78% of organizations are stuck in the middle stages of their DevOps journey. That number has remained virtually unchanged over the past three years. There is some good news: 18% of organizations have moved into the highly evolved category, with just 4% at low levels of DevOps adoption.
Puppet set out to determine why so many DevOps initiatives remain stalled. One problem is incomplete automation of DevOps processes. Just 67% of organizations at the midlevel of DevOps adoption have automated most repetitive tasks compared to 90% of highly evolved organizations.
If you’re looking to take your DevOps initiatives to the next level, our team at DeSeMa can provide you with the support you need. Give us a call to get started today!
Gaps in DevOps Transformation
Many organizations are struggling to develop their code delivery systems. A lot of manual effort is still needed to test applications and push them out into the production environment, which slows down the application delivery lifecycle and limits the agility of the business as a whole. Organizations with an effective continuous integration (CI) or continuous delivery (CD) pipeline can quickly pivot and react to what’s going on in the marketplace. Organizations that don’t could take days or weeks to respond electronically to what’s going on in the marketplace.
A lot of organizations believe that they have a DevOps system. What they mean is that they have a DevOps procedure, but they don’t necessarily have a complete set of DevOps tools.
Other organizations have DevOps tooling but aren’t following a DevOps initiative. The DevOps transformation hasn’t been championed from the top down, and legacy processes remain entrenched. Puppet found that cultural barriers remain the biggest roadblock to DevOps success. Only 30% of organizations with mid level DevOps adoption actively promote DevOps compared to 60% of highly evolved organizations.
Measuring DevOps Success
To be successful, DevOps needs both tools and processes. The two work hand-in-hand to increase deployment frequency and reduce the failure rate of code changes. The lead time to changes should also be minimized. That refers to the length of time for pre release testing, measured from the time a code change is committed to when it’s ready to deploy. The highest performing DevOps teams typically measure lead times in hours, while mid level and low-performing teams measure it in days, weeks, or even months.
Most organizations target same-day change. When the business decides to make a change — perhaps a change in a marketing tactic or the data collected by an input screen — the code change should be in production by the end of that business day. Unless it’s a major code review, it should be relatively straightforward. If the CI/CD platform isn’t capable of that, something is out of alignment.
How DeSema Can Help
DeSeMa’s consultants can assess your environment to determine what tools you are using and what your DevOps initiative processes look like. DevOps is a model, not a toolset, and the tools themselves are designed to work through a specific set of processes. If you’re running the tools without the process, you’re limiting what the tools are capable of doing. Conversely, if you are running the process without the tools, you have to do a lot of things manually that the tools are supposed to do.
When you work with our team of experts for assistance with your DevOps initiatives, we can help you make subtle modifications to get them both optimized and working together. With tools and processes in alignment, you can begin moving toward high levels of DevOps maturity.
DevOps adoption continues apace, but many organizations are struggling to maximize the value of the DevOps model. Let DeSeMa help you augment your DevOps processes and tools so your team can more quickly adapt to changing priorities and rapidly produce and deploy code changes.