The DevOps culture is transforming organizations, allowing them to thrive in a modern world. What is DevOps? Why is DevOps important? By uniting these two silos, an organization can create a culture of collaboration between development and operations, driving faster creation and delivery of high-quality software. Well, it is one of those things that, when you ask ten people what it is, each one will have a different but equally correct answer. To start, DevOps is an abbreviation for Development and Operations. But what does that really mean? To Motivity Labs, DevOps is a collaborative approach that enables the people responsible for creating software (Development) to align their work and efforts with the people responsible for deploying and maintaining that software (Operations).
DevOps is more than just a process or a collection of tools, it is a culture – a mindset that modifies how organizational teams work together to achieve business goals.
When organizations embrace a DevOps culture, they are empowered to be more agile, more responsive, and seek to continuously improve. This culture is all-encompassing and involves the participation and attention of the entire organization, from the Executive level to Operations, to Customer Service.
Why DevOps is Important?
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection” – Mark Twain
Continuous, continuous, continuous everything. Effective DevOps strategies drive organizations to continuously improve their overall operations. Organizations must have a mindset of continuous improvement to match the expectations of employees, customers, or any end-user. Consumers are fickle and inclined to drop products and solutions that don’t meet their needs. In the fast-paced and connected world that we live in, we not only expect but rather demand features that address our needs. To keep up with demands, an organization’s products, processes, and procedures need to be updated as the technology around them evolves.
Motivity Labs’ 6 C’s of DevOps are:
- Continuous Development
- Continuous Testing
- Continuous Monitoring
- Continuous Integration
- Configuration Management and Deployment
- Containerization and Virtualization
It becomes crucial to implement automation to continuously improve every aspect of your organization.
Motivity Labs accomplishes this with our 7 A’s of DevOps:
- Automate Provisioning
- Automate Process
- Automate Builds
- Automate Deployments
- Automate Testing
- Automate Monitoring
- Automate Metrics
DevOps Challenges
DevOps is a culture of change, requiring everyone to continually question how processes and products could be improved. Because of this, some challenges arise.
The first challenge is getting buy-in from all teams and departments. DevOps is collaborative in nature and requires the input and participation of the entire organization. DevOps sparks organizational and structural change, making it critical to have C-level inputs and a unified, organizational-wide, strategy.
Another challenge, and probably the biggest, is the increased pressure placed on QA teams. Continuous Testing is a fundamental aspect of DevOps. That, in addition to the goal of accelerating release cycles, significantly increases the load of QA teams.
As testing increases, so does feedback. As organizations construct their DevOps strategies it’s crucial to have procedures in place to collect, analyze, and react to the anticipated increase in feedback.
A final challenge we will address is how users interact with software in our modern world. This creates yet another burden for QA teams as they need to test more permutations, more frequently.
Automate to Overcome
Automation is a fundamental necessity for an effective DevOps deployment as “Automate Everything” is a key principle of DevOps. DevOps encourages organizations to implement automation anywhere that brings value, from code generation to production monitoring. There are three major benefits organizations receive when adding automation to their DevOps strategy.
The first is the ability to rapidly carry out tasks that normally take time and human resources to complete. The second is being able to quickly accomplish tasks while eliminating the concern of human error. The final, and most important benefit, is that by automating processes, such as
testing, organizations can free up manual resources to take on creative and innovative tasks that cannot be completed with automation or AI. For example, exploratory testing involves testing on the fly to discover, investigate, and learn more about the end-user experience. This is a process
that requires a “human touch”. By automating mundane and repetitive processes, your valuable resources can spend more time doing what they do best.
To maximize both consistency and innovation, Motivity Labs conducts two types of QA testing: automated and manual. Each testing method contains their own set of benefits, that when combined, allow QA teams to maximize quality while reducing the time and cost. Automation- assisted testing eliminates the possibility of human error and frees QA personnel from low-level, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks. With the time saved due to automation, QA personnel can prioritize their time to focus on exploratory, ad-hoc, usability, and another high-level testing that cannot be accomplished with automation. Motivity Labs takes the time to understand your requirements, timeline, budget, and suitability, then formulates a strategy that leverages both automated and manual tests in areas which they will benefit most.
Why Motivity Labs
Motivity Labs DevOps solutions emphasize communication, collaboration, integration, and automation. This allows organizations to remove bottlenecks in software development and assure agile delivery for software-driven innovation. Motivity Labs sees DevOps as a shift in mindset. With this mindset we enable organizations to make their delivery of applications lean and efficient while leveraging feedback from customers and users to continuously improve.
Our mission is to strengthen the critical success factors of the organizations that we serve. Motivity Labs aspires to innovate alongside our clients to ensure value is created at each step. We are highly dedicated to maximizing the happiness and success of every client that chooses Motivity Labs.
The world of technology is constantly evolving and undergoing complex transformations. Our experts at Motivity Labs go through extensive training and continuing education programs to ensure they are knowledgeable about the most advanced solutions. Our number one job is to innovate and constantly deliver value to transform the way you do business.
With Motivity Labs, YOU are always the main focus.
