Are your developers struggling with the release process? Is your organization discovering major problems late in the cycle — or in production? These may be signs that it’s time to adopt the DevOps framework.

Adopting DevOps is a big change, one that can greatly improve your organization’s agility. It requires bringing together different functions and roles who might not otherwise work together each day. This cultural shift is a challenge to overcome, as is setting up the process and the new technology tools needed for the framework. However, when implemented correctly and supported by your company’s leadership, DevOps will give you faster product release cycles with lowered costs and risks.

Many DevOps organizations are releasing software on a weekly basis — or daily — because they are able to bypass months of cycles through improved processes and tooling.

By integrating teams of developers, testers, and operations to contribute more effectively together, along with specialized automation tools, DevOps brings the following benefits:

Introduce feature changes more quickly, enabling fast feedback cycles

All software requires periodic makeovers to improve efficiency and stay competitive. When contending with a growing backlog of feature requests and bug reports, DevOps can help you to regain control of your backlog. And once your release cycles are shortened, the feedback cycle can improve, too: customers’ responses to updates are rapidly available to be evaluated and tested for continuous software improvement. (In a future post, we will talk about the tools that make this possible.)

Reduce the complexity and failure rates of releases through automation

With faster, quicker release cycles, it is no longer necessary to spend months preparing for a high stakes release. While automation may not be easy to set up initially, it is far less costly than manually solving failed releases and errors! This applies both to new software, and maintaining legacy applications. For help calculating the ROI of deployment automation, have a look at IBM’s savings calculator.

Software may be released continuously

In data-intensive industries like healthcare, software often needs to support increasingly heavy loads, while communicating across different providers’ systems. Reducing costs through automation is becoming increasingly critical.

Are you still relying on spreadsheets and legacy systems to manage your data? DevOps can help you integrate and maintain your software while playing a key role in automating business processes. Developers, testers, and operations teams need to work together to execute automated delivery to ensure your software is continually able to adapt to your growing user base, while improving the efficiency and competitiveness of your business.

Resolve technical problems more quickly, and recover faster from failures

Organizations that use DevOps find and fix problems far more quickly through cross-functional teamwork, and automation. This benefit results in measurable productivity gains, as found by Puppet’s State of DevOps Report:

Improve collaboration and efficiency across teams

Rather than having “siloes” of multiple teams working on software, all development, testing and operations team members come together. This requires transparent communication between developers, testers, and operations, and continuous learning.

Initiating this collaboration across functions may be the most difficult changes to achieve. It can be challenging for developers and engineers to leave their comfort zones and communicate in real time. Yet, intrinsic incentives like increased productivity, a shared sense of ownership, and the satisfaction of making a daily impact are strong motivators. And the measurable cost savings and risk reduction make a compelling case for executive buy-in.

Need help transforming your organization to DevOps? EPIC’s near-shore teams are already supporting our clients’ DevOps transformations. If you’re ready for fast and frequent releases of quality software, contact us.