IBM Puts DevOps to Work

by Darryl K. Taft

Delivering quality software on time and on target isn’t easy. A large chunk of time is often spent troubleshooting application issues in test and production. And the resulting bottlenecks can stifle progress and innovation. With mobile, social, big data and cloud technologies driving demand for new, faster and more frequent approaches to software delivery, businesses are benefiting from an approach called DevOps that puts the development shop closer to operations to identify problems early and bring software to production more quickly.

When upgrading or creating a new version of an app, the software development team dives into and analyzes continuously provided customer feedback, using it to shape experience and feature objectives of the new app.

Next, the team reviews the requested functionality to determine alignment with business strategy and goals, balancing those priorities with user feedback to decide what to implement in the next release cycle.

Once project goals are approved, development and operations teams use collaborative software to track the creation of the new app. Working together, the development and operations teams make necessary changes to the code, preparing for application testing and stakeholder reviews.

As the team completes development tasks, they continuously test the app’s new features and updates using automated functional and performance testing. In many cases, tests are executed in minutes, and “service virtualization” lets them test complex system dependencies and integration environments virtually, dramatically saving time and cost.

After the app has passed automated functional and performance tests, it is tested in a pre-deployment staging environment for user testing and finally into put production for customers to use and comment.

The app goes live and into production. Using intuitive dashboards, the team confirms the app is working well and monitors performance and capacity loading. If problems occur, automated tools on the dashboard help the team quickly restore service and ensure stability.

Software is the invisible thread weaving through the systems, services and products that make businesses run better. And when it’s developed using a DevOps approach, businesses see their costs and time to market go down, productivity and quality go up, and their staff free to focus on more important tasks.

DevOps is an integrated approach to software delivery that integrates an organization’s culture, processes and tools.

DevOps offers flexibility in development options and makes it easier for developers to create cloud-native applications.

With DevOps, a development team rapidly tests many iterations of a software program with users in order to quickly identify potential problems and bring the software to production faster.