5 DevOps practices to enhance software development efficiency

September 19, 2024

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DevOps is more than IT operations and software development teams working together, tools or practices. It's a mindset and a culture of adapting to new ways of collaboration. The term DevOps, a combination of the words "development" and "operations", reflects the process of integrating these disciplines into one, continuous process.

How does DevOps model work?

A DevOps team consists of developers and IT operations collaborating throughout the product lifecycle to enhance the speed and quality of software deployment. This represents a new approach, a so-called cultural change, with considerable impact on both teams and the organizations they support. DevOps teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. DevOps model has a wide range of benefits, such as:

• Security
• High speed of delivery
• Reliability
• Scalability
• Efficient collaboration

Now when you know how DevOps model works and what are its benefits, let's talk about DevOps practices which enhance software development process.

Monitoring

Monitoring is very important for DevOps teams. The whole lifecycle from planning to deployment and operations is thoroughly monitored. This way teams can identify bottle necks in development and improve the whole process to avoid them in future.

Different monitoring tools can be used in DevOps to automate, measure and define development processes. Monitoring tools are essential because organizations ensure the availability, performance, and overall health of their IT systems and applications. Here are a couple of examples of DevOps monitoring tools: Nagios, Prometheus, Grafana, Datalog, Zabbix, etc.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI and CD) are the practices of automating the integration of code changes into a software project and deploying code changes to a testing or production environment.

The primary objectives of continuous integration are to identify and fix bugs more rapidly, enhance software quality, and shorten the time needed to validate and release new software updates. Continuous delivery improves velocity, productivity, and sustainability of software development teams.

Continuous feedback

Continuous feedback provided throughout the product development cycle allows making improvements by facilitating rapid communication, collaboration and adaptation. It's a continuous process of analysis and collecting feedback from various sources such as: testes, users, developers on every stage of the development process. Continuous feedback loop includes code reviews, retrospectives, various metrics, automated testing, static code analysis, incident management, beta testing, user survey and feedback. By setting up continuous feedback process you will get the following benefits:

• Enhanced collaboration
• Better product quality
• Streamlined development processes
• Improved reliability and stability

Deployment processes automation

Automated deployment processes are vital for DevOps pipeline. They not only increase speed of development but also reduce human errors and increase the productivity of the whole team. One of the primary advantages is the ability to release software faster and more frequently. With help of deployment processes automation manual steps are eliminated together with human errors which can be easily made during manual deployment.

Tools for efficient collaboration

It is a known fact that efficient collaboration requires powerful tools. A wide range of tools can be used in DevOps. There is a tool for every task. However, the more tools your team utilizes the harder is to keep your infrastructure safe. Enhancing collaboration within the DevOps team boosts deployment frequency, thereby speeding up time to market. During downtimes, a well-coordinated DevOps team is likely to respond more quickly and resolve the underlying issues efficiently. Let's see what kind of tools can make the collaboration more efficient:

1. Virola corporate messenger supports a wide range of features, such as private and group chats, meetings, files sharing, threads, tasks and issues tracking, task board, screen sharing and remote control. It is a perfect solution for product development teams who value their time and care of data protection.
2. Atlassian JIRA is a robust DevOps collaboration tool built to capture, assign, and prioritize tasks with precision. It removes ambiguity, allowing you to define tasks clearly, assign them to the appropriate team members, and prioritize efficiently. Moreover, you can easily track the progress and see what team members are working on.
3. Pivotal Tracker is an agile project management tool designed to simplify communication, collaboration, and task management. While it facilitates these processes, its primary function is to help you closely monitor and track specific tasks in real time.
4. Docker is an open platform for building and running applications. It allows separating your applications from the underlying infrastructure, enabling faster software delivery. With Docker, you can manage your infrastructure in the same manner as you manage your applications.
5. Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration (CI) server that controls and manages various stages of the software delivery process, such as building, documentation, automated testing, packaging, and static code analysis. It is a widely used DevOps tool, trusted by thousands of development teams.

This is not the full list of collaboration tools used by DevOps teams for collaboration. However, you need to select them for your team wisely, taking into account the team's size, types of products you develop and understanding of the improvements you want to make.