Think Holistically and Act Fast
At a high level, continuous improvement is a lofty and wor-
thy goal for ambitious organizations. But how do you put it
into practice? What are the benefits of doing it right? And
what are the costs of doing it wrong?
The most important step for DevOps organizations is
ensuring that continuous improvement gets infused into
processes, procedures and culture early on. Organizations
that wait too long find themselves scrambling to plug holes,
rather than thinking holistically about building a system
dedicated to ongoing innovation.
feedback, track it, log it and integrate it back into the knowl-
edge system. Tools need to be robust and capable enough
to work in context with the organization’s cloud platform.
Test Early and Often
Automated testing plays a big role in an advanced software
delivery process. Installing a series of tests – for perfor-
mance, security, integration and system usage – is a first
step. But the true value is not just in automating the testing
framework but in integrating all functions, creating a sys-
tem that feeds the continuous improvement loop.
To be a true,
peak-functioning
DevOps organiza-
tion, you need to
make process part
of the improvement
cycle – all the way
down to how you
are implementing
and developing
your processes.
DevOps in the cloud requires con-
tinuous improvement in three
principal areas. One is the soft-
ware itself. To build, design and
deliver a quality application, orga-
nizations need to have mecha-
nisms in place to test and inspect
the app itself. Second is the cloud
environment supporting the app
being designed, built and deliv-
ered. Is the cloud performing well,
meeting the organization’s
needs? Controls are needed to
optimize the environment on an
ongoing basis. Third are the pro-
cesses you use to produce soft-
ware and the cloud environment
itself. This cuts a level deeper. To
be a true, peak-functioning
DevOps organization, you need
to make process part of the
improvement cycle – all the way down to how you are imple-
menting and developing your processes.
Continuous improvement requires a steady stream of feed-
back from customers – both internal and external. This
applies to software companies as well as to enterprise IT
software providers. To do this, organizations need to imple-
ment a rock-solid logging and monitoring strategy. This
requires a centralized mechanism to capture customer
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WINTER 2019
Continuous integration (CI) pulls
the functions together. Putting
software development practices
in place that leverage feedback,
automate the practices and
amplify the feedback flows will
generate steady improvements in
the overall delivery process. The
real trick is to speed things up to
the point where feedback flows in
fast enough to fuel daily commits.
Letting commits pile up until
release can be a nightmare. To
continuously improve, you need
to
embrace
continuous
integration.
Cloud is a target area, too. In the
cloud, you can automate the
building of infrastructure and
integrate it with software applica-
tions. Managing the environment
in code (infrastructure as code) allows an organization to
steadily improve the performance and scale on an ongoing
basis.
The third area of improvement is to fully master and incre-
mentally improve the way you design, build and deliver
your software delivery processes. This is where the true
power of DevOps lies. There are several ways to continu-
ously improve facets of software delivery.