Skip to main content

The 15 symptoms indicating that your company needs DevOps

Linkedin

Nowadays, organisations of all sizes are transforming the way in which they design, develop and deliver software. The business objective today is to deliver high-quality applications in less time, to satisfy market demands and improve customer experience. Given this situation, implementing a DevOps methodology, which fosters collaboration between the Development and Operations teams and delivers improvements in speed, stability and reliability, would seem to be the best strategy.

 

That said, to what extent are IT managers aware of the need to adopt DevOps practices?

 

To help in this diagnosis, we have summarised the symptoms indicating that an organisation needs DevOps:

 

  1. Development and Operations teams continue to work in silos, organised independently and a long way from aligning objectives, strategies, procedures, methods and tools.
  2. The organisation is working with fragile applications that have little availability or tolerance and you discover defects in production (which could have been anticipated). The team stops to fix the incidents, causing a backlog of planned work and increasing the amount of “re-work”.
  3. It is difficult to identify whether the problems come from Development, Testing or Operations, because most issues arise after the developers have finished their work.
  4. Every time a problem arises, it is difficult to work out who is responsible, leading to the “blame game” – pointing at and blaming each other.
  5. Communication between departments is inefficient and sometimes misinterpreted.
  6. Deployment between environments is manual and documented via a large number of steps.
  7. Human errors are being committed that wreak havoc during the development and deployment phases.
  8. Due to all the above, the execution cycle times for deployments last days or even weeks, instead of hours and/or minutes.
  9. The testing to validate that the deployment has been carried out correctly is done manually.
  10. There are many projects queued up that cannot be started because there are not enough resources available, and so-called “Shadow IT” is particularly problematic in creating bottlenecks.
  11. Agile methodologies are used during the development process, but any advantage gained disappears when the software passes to the team responsible for deploying it to a production environment.
  12. The Development team believes that its work and responsibility have come to an end after release into production.
  13. There is constantly too much “work in progress” (WIP), that is, undeployed changes (for example, new functionality or applications).
  14. There is no version control for configuration files.
  15. The IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex, with physical, virtualised and Cloud-based elements.

These 15 symptoms are those we encounter most frequently when our clients come to us with their problem. However, each organisation has its own specific set of circumstances. The important thing is to have already identified the difficulties that we are looking to resolve with DevOps and that we are doing so in accordance with our own objectives and drivers, whether methodological, technological or purely economic. One goal that is common to companies that migrate to DevOps is to achieve greater client and user satisfaction thanks to the continuous updates to the applications, which are now also much more reliable and stable.

 

If you think that your organisation is suffering from some of the symptoms mentioned, contact us to find out how DevOps could resolve them.

 

 

is Marketing Manager at Xeridia