Traditional project management is plagued by slow development cycles and silos, where information is withheld between departments. This lack of communication and traditional divide between teams negatively affects collaboration and effectiveness. Meanwhile, heavy reliance on manual processes and dated infrastructure hampers adaptability to market changes, causing time-to-market delays and process bottlenecks.
By unifying the efforts of Development and Operations (DevOps), automating tasks, and emphasizing continuous testing and deployment, organizations can overcome these challenges and improve efficiency in web product development. However, implementing DevOps, especially in organizations accustomed to older disciplines requires significant time and effort investments from all stakeholders.
As a result, many companies interested in exploring the advantages of DevOps for their business turn to a DevOps service company for consultancy. By leveraging the shared experiences of experts, you not only get to implement your new systems smoothly and quickly but also get to ensure the most efficient use of your resources.
Understanding DevOps in Project Management
Put simply, DevOps is a software development philosophy that integrates the Development and Operations teams of a project into one unit. By allowing both teams to collaborate hand in hand throughout the system development lifecycle, DevOps enables seamless collaboration between the two traditionally separated departments. But DevOps isn’t limited to just development and operation teams working together. It also emphasizes continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) — a cyclical workflow of development and release as opposed to linear and sequential software production. Additionally, the third pillar of DevOps is automation, which uses robots to streamline repetitive tasks that human personnel would otherwise handle. As one should expect, automation in project management boosts accuracy, speed, and reliability in several areas, thereby leading to faster app deployments.
In the following sections, we will touch on these principles of DevOps in more detail and explore best practices for implementing them in your organization.
Effective Collaboration: Integration of Development and Operations
Before the DevOps movement began in 2007, software developers (who code) worked separately from the operations team (who are responsible for releasing and operating the code). However, this divide frequently results in inefficiencies, miscommunication, and delays in delivering software. For example, if Development creates code under a certain software dependency and Operations runs the program using a different one, the result would be a software conflict. To remedy these challenges, Development and Operations were bridged together. Thus, rather than working in isolation, development and operations personnel now combine tools, processes, and their skills, facilitating shared responsibility for building, deploying, and maintaining software and ensuring they can work cohesively throughout the software development lifecycle.
DevOps Practices
Common tools and practices DevOps teams use to streamline collaboration include:
- CI/CD tools. CI/CD technologies automate the process of incorporating code changes into applications, allowing for continuous updates and ensuring code is always in a deployable state.
- Infrastructure as code. Rather than having to provision infrastructure manually, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) technologies enable you to manage computing infrastructure automatically. The result is reduced manual errors and deployment delays.
- With tools like Kubernetes, organizations can arrange apps with all their dependencies into lightweight, portable containers so that teams can share and exchange. This enables efficient deployment of software in a variety of environments.
- For development and operations teams, task automation frees up time, which can be diverted into more strategic work.
- Version control. Version control keeps a history of source code and changes as developers save new versions of code. This helps teams maintain a stable codebase throughout product development.
Automation of Repetitive Tasks in Project Management: How to Use the Tools
Automation in DevOps refers to the integration of certain technologies that reduce human intervention, improve monitoring capabilities, and allow organizations to work with vast amounts of data, leading to faster deployments and iterative update releases.
Various processes in the software development lifecycle can be accelerated with DevOps automation. Instead of having to make manual changes to infrastructure, developers can leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate the provisioning and lifecycle management of networks, servers, and operating systems. Not only does infrastructure as code minimize the time it takes to update infrastructure, but it also removes the possibility of human error. Another aspect of development that benefits from DevOps automation is monitoring. By using automated systems, your DevOps team can closely monitor important metrics like resource use and contributor performance, in addition to signals and anomalies from engineering systems. With more data and visibility into their workflows, organizations are in a better position to make calculated decisions, improve their systems, and resolve issues effectively.
There are numerous tools and frameworks you can use to implement DevOps automation, such as Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, Ansible, and many others. These tools offer diverse features like automated building and testing, infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and source code management.
CI/CD: How To Make Deployment Process Easier
Continuous Integration is a practice that requires developers to consistently integrate code branches into a shared repository like Git, and then carry out automated tests and builds to validate the feasibility of those changes. Continuous delivery/deployment, on the other hand, expands upon CI by subjecting code changes to a production or testing environment after they pass the build stage. These include UI tests, functional tests, smoke tests, end-to-end tests, and API reliability tests. When you implement continuous delivery correctly, you will spot defects early on and ensure your product is deployment-ready by passing it through standard automated assessments. Lastly, continuous deployment, the second part of CD, refers to the automation of developer releases from repository to production, where it becomes user-ready. Together, CI/CD work to ensure the rapid delivery of software and to avert bugs and code failures efficiently.
How to Implement CI/CD to Improve Releases
Here are several best practices to help project managers implement CI/CD to improve software releases:
- Make it a team effort. The success of CI/CD relies on the absence of the traditional silos between engineers, developers, and QA engineers.
- Build once. A common mistake with CI/CD is creating a new build for each stage. By doing so, you risk introducing inconsistencies into your pipeline, so it’s best practice to preserve everything, including your build, configuration, and deployment scripts in the same source as the app code.
- Streamline your tests. Keep a balance between performance and test coverage. Experts suggest that the longer it takes to obtain test results, the more people will try to get around the rules.
- Other CI/CD implementation best practices include cleaning pre-production environments, documenting your release and rollback plans, automatically deploying code changes, and monitoring/measuring your pipelines.
In a Nutshell
To recap, the DevOps approach in project management is a collection of practices that synchronize the efforts of Development and Operations teams within an organization. By facilitating seamless collaboration between those two traditionally siloed departments, automating mundane tasks to better utilize human resources, and using the right automated tools to implement agile principles, DevOps project management streamlines all the stages involved in software development, testing, and release.
If you’re wondering how to introduce DevOps practices into your organization, you can start by encouraging a mindset shift, particularly for team members trained in other methodologies, and promoting inter-team collaboration, open sharing of ideas, and project accountability to do away with silos.
With over a decade in the tech field, Bogdan blends technical expertise with insights on business innovation in technology.
A regular contributor to TMS Outsource's blog, where you'll find sharp analyses on software development, tech business strategies, and global tech dynamics.
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