How to Use Discipline to Achieve Agile DevOps

Despite the promises of DevOps collaboration, software release processes have long been stuck with the myth that IT departments can’t have the best of both the speed and reliability worlds. However, the latest State of DevOps report revealed that IT organizations are finding ways to bust the myth and marry speed and reliability for more effective release cycles.

The State of DevOps in the Enterprise

Using throughput measures such as deployment frequency and deployment lead time as well as the mean time between failures for stability measurement, the State of DevOps report shows statistics regarding high-performing IT organizations using DevOps principles:

• They deploy code 30 times more frequently than disjointed DevOps organizations.

• They experience 60% fewer failures than mismanaged DevOps teams.

• Their release cycles are up to 200 times faster than those IT departments that haven’t mastered DevOps collaboration.In cases of failure, high-performing DevOps teams recover 168 times faster than low performing peers.

At the very least, the State of DevOps report proves that DevOps can facilitate the results that the collaborative strategy has promised for years. However, the question remains—what are these high-performing IT organizations doing that other DevOps teams haven’t figured out yet?

While DevOps is often focused on the engineering level with the greatest attention paid to continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), IT operations are often overwhelmed by the rapid production rate and poor build quality.

For DevOps teams to reach their fullest potential, engineering teams must elevate release management to the IT director and CIO levels who focus more on delivery assurance throughout the DevOps process.

To keep up with increasing demand for high-quality, rapid software releases, IT organizations must shift to Disciplined DevOps—an approach to software release collaboration that blends Agile delivery with risk management and governance that support delivery assurance.

What is DevOps? Getting Back to a Basic Definition

The term DevOps has become so overblown in recent years that companies of all sizes have created their own definitions to fit their specific needs. Tool and service vendors have been, in a large part, responsible for the confusion of DevOps definitions.

DevOps is a fundamental ideology that aims to improve agility, speed, and collaboration to get software releases into production quicker by bridging the chasm between IT development teams and IT operations teams.

The Disciplined DevOps Difference

Continuous delivery is becoming a mainstay at startups and more nimble organizations because it keeps software releases from sitting in queues for days or weeks waiting to be tested and qualified.Disciplined DevOps is an approach to software release collaboration that blends Agile delivery with risk management and governance that support delivery assurance.

However, larger organizations are still clinging to manual processes for their business-critical applications.

While maintaining small manual steps helps mitigate the risk of software release failure, the competitive landscape is quickly forcing large enterprises to quicken their release pace. If IT organizations are focused on reducing the risk of failure by manually processing releases, other potential risks become a problem:

• Slower time-to-market that falls behind competitor innovation.

• Manual testing leads to more bugs in production, more testing, and ultimately greater deployment costs.

• Meantime between deployments rises, leaving DevOps teams to incur a long queue of upcoming projects.Without a focus on lean development and production, quality suffers and releases fail.

Disciplined DevOps brings the governance benefits of waterfall delivery to the agility companies to seek when adopting DevOps.Did you find this interesting? Learn how to implement Disciplined DevOps reading our free white paper “Disciplined DevOps Blending Agility with Risk Management & Governance”