DevOps and the continuous flow of value

If it was the introduction of Agile that the software industry was heavily benefited by involving the customer early in the process, it’s the introduction of DevOps that brings Agile to its full potential by enabling the change in the organization to make sure that the focus is on continuous value delivery.

DevOps more than tooling is a cultural change in the workplace that brings people closer with emphasis on collaboration and communication to work on a shared vision for continuous value delivery. DevOps professionals ensure reliability and speed in this process by depending heavily on automation of infrastructure, software development, testing and feedback process. This requires all the members in the team (Operations, Developers and Business) to work hand-in-hand to improve the organization’s competitiveness, thus creating a highly visible change that benefits the internal process as well as the end users.

The continuous flow of value means that teams are capable of moving an idea into production quickly and frequently without compromising on quality. DevOps teams achieve this by removing silos and have multidisciplinary skillsets in the team needed to make this possible. With the help of automated deployment pipelines, automated acceptance testing, automated infrastructure etc. new features can reach production within a very short span of time. To improve the effectiveness  of the DevOps transition and increase customer happiness, teams should focus more on gathering real time application and user data. Services like Visual studio application insights provides easy configurable live monitoring on the application. It also helps detect and diagnose performance issues and understand what users actually do with the application. DevOps teams make use of these kind of tools to continuously improve the usability and performance of the products they are creating.

Another simple way of testing the acceptance or likability of the new feature is by adding a quick and easy feedback mechanism in the product itself. You can make use of ideas like implementing a like button or a simple smiley to collect user feedback on the live feature. These kind of actionable evidences play a major role in ensuring that the actual value is reaching the customers faster and thus creating a success story for your DevOps journey.