DevOps – connecting Development, Quality Assurance and technical operations together so they work as a unit.

Continuous delivery is the platform on which DevOps is enabled. This platform ensures an all hands down approach and takes out all barriers that prevent teams from working together. This is way different and not so like the earlier models where software development was in silos.

Continuous delivery is a developmental exercise in itself. The teams which were earlier separate now work together as a single unit.  Most of what DO has evolved today stems from agile development practices. These are fine-tuned over a period of years and evolved to the DO we know today. It’s not a hard and fast rule that DO should be adopted across every need. If your release cycles are many and haptic, then DO could be the effective vehicle that steers your developmental engine the right way.

Developers learn to check in their code multiple times a day. This is auto-verified before commits, and then shared with the team. Since you get to see statuses of all check-in’s fast, errors are corrected and stable releases are made faster. DevOps targets product delivery, continuous testing, quality testing, feature development and maintenance releases. Automation fuels most of these initiatives. Not like the other models where a development release is rolled out, then goes to QA, comes back later on. By the time bugs are filed, the developers would have moved on.

DevOps ensures low failure rates of delivered software. Since DO integrates all pillars of software development as a single entity, events are now granularly tracked, development environments become more stable. This gives more control to developers. They can concentrate on creating more application-centric releases. Infra/IT management becomes more efficient and reliable as regular, consistent and smaller releases weed out any known problems.

DevOps is necessary to today’s software development as most of the industry rides on one powerful word – collaboration. Today, customer preferences are changing, perceptions are changing. Software standards change to accommodate the maximum, so that there’s value when you release software for the masses. This dynamic, hard hitting world demands an equal and dynamic platform. Moreover, the Internet has already accelerated collaboration to a new high. Time is of the essence, the faster you release, the better positioned you are. And, as with every other revolution it’s only the beginning.