Simplifying Continuous Delivery: 5 Must-Dos to accelerate DevOps Journey

Sanjay Jupudi, Founder & President at Qentelli, brings the practical best practices that his teams adopt / implement when working towards their DevOps journey.

Here's an infographic that briefly tells you how to approach Continuous Delivery along with an elaborated blog post to kick start your Continuous Delivery Journey.

Process First

Organizations moving towards DevOps should adopt processes that enable extreme agility built on collaboration and automation as the corner stones. Automation has to span beyond your traditional thinking of testing (Functional and Regression). Automation first must be the mindset for every stage, every process and none more important than operations and user feedback. For instance, adopting processes such as Test Driven Development(TDD) / Behavior Driven Development(BDD) help in achieving In-Sprint automation and further to setting up quality gates that include true build parameters that include dev, test and Ops metrics as the toll gate criteria at various stages in the pipeline. One thing we preach and practice is to Re-Think your definitions of Ready and Done to improve efficiency in process and adoption of DevOps at large.

Automate

After setting up the processes, it is important to automate each stage of the pipeline to achieve true Continuous Delivery. In our experience, automated test execution is only the start. Teams must explore areas of automation that include configuration management, environment creation / management, build promotion and deployments in addition to other manual activities. This automated process flow must be backed by automated check gates / toll gates that provide into real-time insights into the quality at each stage and learnings to be had for the consecutive iterations must be presented to teams for accelerated learnings. Simple process automation tweaks have helped many organizations increase their product delivery speed by over 25x.

Orchestration

To unlock the true power of automation, a seamless orchestration of the various tools in the DevOps tool chain, along with specific quality check gates, helps achieve greater product quality, and less production defect leakage. For some of our enterprise customers, we had brought down their production defect leakage from 25% to a mere 5% and reduced their downtimes from couple of days to few hours, by automating and orchestrating the delivery process as part of continuous delivery pipeline. Start thinking MTTR and other key areas that help influence outcomes positively. It is imperative for teams to orchestrate analysis and predictability through automated correlation by leveraging AI, ML and deep learning to understand, remediate and predict patterns.

Real-time Collaboration

From large enterprises to mid-sized to Tech start-ups, the need to break silos is paramount. It goes without saying that leaders that advocate One-team, one-dream mindset are more successful not at just breaking the silos between teams but increasing collaboration dramatically and thus accelerating efficiency / productivity gains to be had from the adoption of DevOps. Encouraging use of collaboration tools effectively, such as Slack/Microsoft Teams including integration to various build and deployment tools enhances the ease of DevOps adoption, and satisfied the need for speed of communication in digital journeys. Disrupt with collaboration, unthank email communication.

Measure, Track, Learn, Improve

Breaking silos, automating key processes and bringing everyone together are only the first steps to successful DevOps implementation. While some might argue that Continuous Delivery is an incremental journey with continuous improvement, from our experience, the best way to accelerate (and start / increase adoption) is by being disruptive in breaking the traditional thinking and forklifting the process and automation pieces; While letting continuous improvement have its place to mature the processes and rapidly (with agility) introduce learnings and best practices. Being able to view the status of various stages as part of a Single source of truth, in real time, and taking corrective actions based on predictive analytics has been key to achieving high levels of maturity in Continuous Delivery.

The "Qentelli Way" to Continuous Delivery

Qentelli is technology company focused on Digital Acceleration through automation and continuous delivery. We helped leading financial services firm, fast-food retail chain (QSRs) and low-cost carrier in their journey towards DevOps and Digital Transformation by automating their end to end CI/CD processes with Qentelli's CI/CD approach, popularly known among our customers as "The Qentelli Way". Qentelli takes a wholistic approach to DevOps, CI/CD implementation which includes removing silos and increasing collaboration between various stakeholders, training existing team, defining roles and responsibilities, and providing technical solution. We have deep experience implementing enterprise level CI/CD solutions which included complex systems with integrations to legacy platforms and packaged applications. Our expertise in implementing Functional and Non-Functional test automation solutions has also helped our customers release with more confidence!

Whether it is customers with mature CI/CD implementations or someone just getting started on the journey, our expertise in this space has helped many enterprises and smaller companies with our customized solutions.

To learn and explore more in detail, please write to us at info@qentelli.com. Our experts will be delighted to engage with you. Also, you can visit Qentelli’s social links for more details-
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About Qentelli

Headquartered in Dallas, TX with global delivery teams in India, Qentelli is an Industry Thought Leader in Quality Engineering, Automated Testing and Continuous Delivery. With high performing engineering teams working in the dedicated Innovation Group, Qentelli brings design thinking to address complex business problems and enables Continuous Delivery across Enterprise IT through automation for its global customers.
www.qentelli.com