Category: E-Books

Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows about DevOps now. In a nutshell, DevOps is a Software Development philosophy centered on agility, automation, and collaboration within development and operations teams.

The DevOps market is expected to grow from $3.42 billion in 2018 to $10.31 billion in 2023 at a CAGR of 24.7 percent, suggest Markets and Markets.

DevOps gives a modern twist to Software Development, which traditionally happened in silos. IT and development teams worked independently with their teams and set of processes. This separation created an environment of competition instead of collaboration, leading to inefficient processes and delays in production.

The goal of DevOps is to eliminate this distinction between the two core development teams. DevOps attempts to remove inefficiencies in the software development process by aligning the strategy of the teams and creating more seamless processes for faster time to market.

To understand how DevOps improves upon many software factors, we need to look at its process flow.

The DevOps Process Flow

While DevOps is a practical methodology, it also leads to a fundamental change in an organization’s culture and the mindset of its people. DevOps stands firm on a few fundamental principles:

• Automation – Since DevOps promotes a culture of continuous improvement with faster releases, organizations need to eliminate manual execution of trivial tasks that hog up critical employee hours. This is where automation plays a role. DevOps encourages automation not only in the software development process but in the entire infrastructure by building container-based cloud platforms that allow builds to be versioned and updated.

• Agile Planning – Instead of the traditional approaches to Project Management, DevOps supports Agile planning, which organizes work in short iterations and increases the number of releases. Agile planning increases flexibility and room for pivots by allowing teams to have only high-level objectives outlined while having a detailed plan for the next two iterations in advance.

• Iterations – Iterations are an essential concept in DevOps where teams make quick revisions to code and allow flexibility in changing the course where needed. DevOps, in itself, is an iterative method that promotes continuously making small increments in a software product to encourage transparency in the process and minimize errors at the end of the development cycle.

• Self-Service – Self-service DevOps enables developers to deploy apps and software on demand all by themselves as the IT team has done its part of the job beforehand. This way, DevOps ensures there are no hiccups and delays in product delivery, achieving a state of continuous delivery.

• Continuous Improvement  – In the light of changing circumstances, DevOps philosophy enables teams to adapt to customer needs, new technologies, or changes in regulatory compliances. To minimize waste and optimize cost and speed of development, DevOps strongly recommends continuous improvement throughout iterations.

• Collaboration – The DevOps practice is not based on working in silos. Far from it. It encourages IT and development teams to work in conjunction, dissolving any pre-existing boundaries within the two departments. For this reason alone, DevOps can be seen as a cultural shift rather than a new practice for organizations.
• Continuous Testing – This principle focuses on achieving continuous improvement and quality of products. The constant testing process helps find gaps in product quality and interactively fix them, so they don’t mount upon one another at the end of development.

Besides these core principles, DevOps work on three core practices:

• Continuous Integration (CI) – CI aims at integrating the work of individual developers into a central code repository frequently and early on in the development process. When practised several times a day, continuous integration ensures early detection of integration bugs and a better quality of the product.

• Continuous Delivery (CD) – CD aims to automate the software delivery process to enable assured and comfortable deployments into production at any time. Businesses can use an automatic or manual trigger to release bug-free code into production frequently.

• Continuous Deployment – Continuous integration and delivery, when combined, support the constant deployment of project code at the customer’s end.

The Importance of Product Definitions

Of course, DevOps can be termed as successful only when the product is properly defined. A well-defined product definition ensures that all stakeholders are on the same page with respect to the product requirements, features, and manifestation.

At a broad level, product definition involves

• Identification of the problems that the product should solve, the exact user/ customer profile, and what would the product success look like

• Building the business case, market necessities, use cases, and the overall vision for the product

• Defining a well-characterized UI/UX to create a frictionless and pleasant product

When Continuous Product Definition Meets DevOps

Continuous, frequent, and optimized Product Definition in DevOps leads to several benefits, such as:

• Significant increase in the number of quality product releases combined with continuous integration and delivery.

• Improved confidence in the team as there is less room for errors and teams collaborate on a mature level to deliver the end product.

• Reduction in manual labor with implementation automation. Menial tasks are, therefore, left to automation while employees focus on delivering product versions to the customer.

• Minimized risk of errors or failure in production as teams implement continuous testing to eliminate any bugs and rapidly deploy bug-free code to production.

• Faster feedback incorporation as any feedback from the customer leading to higher customer satisfaction.

• More room for innovation as teams collaborate and look at how the next iteration can be made better while the product definition is being constantly validated.

• Faster time to market of the right products leading to strong competitive advantage.

• Higher ROI as teams don’t spend hours working on unnecessary features, they test often, and minimize wastage of code when nearing deployment.

In 2018, 72 percent of companies had already adopted DevOps in some form or the other; 17% of them have fully embraced the technology.

DevOps is getting more and more popular and continuous product definition is accentuating its effect on the delivery cycles and development methodologies of many companies.
At Pratiti Technologies, we help businesses in transforming their development cycles with DevOps and continuous product definition. We offer an array of services and tools to ensure you follow the right DevOps roadmap, strategy, and measure the performance of your development lifecycle to see improved ROI.

Talk to us about our DevOps services today!

Our Services

DevOps Services | Digital Twin Platform | Healthcare Software Development | IoT Development Services

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus of Ephesus

I have always believed that advice that works for someone in a specific context might not work for another. Times change and with it do people, behaviors, and attitudes. It is because of this, for any advice to be of any relevance, it has to be malleable enough to be adaptable.
The case is no different when it comes to product development. Product development teams today are living in the vortex of change. There is something new to battle every day – be it new technology, a new consumer demand, a new tool, a new development methodology, a new skill set…the variables in product development are always tipping in favor of a change.

Despite how unnerving this environment of change might look externally, I believe, for product development teams, these are all great problems to have. These challenges provide new opportunities to innovate and grow both professionally and personally.
However, I also believe that living in this change, transition, globalization, pressing times lines, increased competition, and increased pressure to roll out robust products owing to changing customer preferences, is anything but easy.

“How can you make the product better” has become the mantra for survival putting product development teams under increased pressure. Challenges are the new normal in the product development environment.

So how can product development teams navigate this new world, battle its challenges, and emerge victorious? My advice would be to do the hardest things first.

I know I had said that no generic advice could be considered good. However, this advice that I am giving is malleable. It can be used to suit your specific situation, circumstance, and time. That is what makes this relevant.

Now let’s come back to why I said that doing the hardest things first is the best solution for product development teams.
The power of value

If you read enough time management articles, you’ll see that these primarily tell you to do the easier things first. This gives you a sense of accomplishment as you see tasks being ticked off your to-do list. However, I have noticed, that most commonly, the easiest tasks are of the lowest value. They might be important in the larger scheme of things but do not necessarily help, assist, or complement the other moving parts.
Hard tasks, on the contrary, are almost always of high value. They form an important part of the big picture and have many associated dependencies. The impact of these tasks is also greater than simpler ones. Ticking off the hard tasks on your to-do list gives you a sense of real accomplishment because you manage to deliver greater value.

Think about it – what would make you feel more accomplished? Climbing a hillock or scaling a mountain? Hard tasks are like scaling the mountain. It is hard to do but hold more value, and hence the sense of accomplishment that follows is unparallel.
The power of momentum

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase; just take the first step”. This quote by Martin Luther King is one I go back to every time I feel like I am looking at a hard challenge.

When things look tough, we often tend to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem. The trick to conquering this feeling is to break down the problem, identify its cause, and then fix it.

When it comes to product development, it makes sense to tackle the hardest thing causing a problem/issue/ roadblock, etc. for a very simple reason – it helps you set things into motion. When you identify the answer to the hardest challenge, you automatically get answers to your lesser value problems as well.

Once you get going with the hard things at hand early in the product development cycle, it sets the pace for your team, and the momentum keeps you moving. Once the pace is set, this momentum automatically accelerates in the right direction.

The power of value

If you read enough time management articles, you’ll see that these primarily tell you to do the easier things first. This gives you a sense of accomplishment as you see tasks being ticked off your to-do list. However, I have noticed, that most commonly, the easiest tasks are of the lowest value. They might be important in the larger scheme of things but do not necessarily help, assist, or complement the other moving parts.

Hard tasks, on the contrary, are almost always of high value. They form an important part of the big picture and have many associated dependencies. The impact of these tasks is also greater than simpler ones. Ticking off the hard tasks on your to-do list gives you a sense of real accomplishment because you manage to deliver greater value.

Think about it – what would make you feel more accomplished? Climbing a hillock or scaling a mountain? Hard tasks are like scaling the mountain. It is hard to do but hold more value, and hence the sense of accomplishment that follows is unparallel.

The power of momentum

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase; just take the first step”. This quote by Martin Luther King is one I go back to every time I feel like I am looking at a hard challenge.

When things look tough, we often tend to get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem. The trick to conquering this feeling is to break down the problem, identify its cause, and then fix it.

When it comes to product development, it makes sense to tackle the hardest thing causing a problem/issue/ roadblock, etc. for a very simple reason – it helps you set things into motion. When you identify the answer to the hardest challenge, you automatically get answers to your lesser value problems as well.

Once you get going with the hard things at hand early in the product development cycle, it sets the pace for your team, and the momentum keeps you moving. Once the pace is set, this momentum automatically accelerates in the right direction.

Accelerate your feedback loop

Feedback is a vital piece of the puzzle that helps product development teams roll out robust, error-free products into the market faster. However, understanding the customer and what she wants in a shape-shifting economy can be hard to nail.

Getting to know how your customers want to use your product, how they want to experience it, and what they want from the product down to the last detail has to be the core of product development teams. But how can they achieve this?

Apart from the usual suspects of requirement gathering, product teams can accelerate the feedback loop by working on the hard things first. Usually, it is the hard things that constitute the most crucial part of the product. Getting done with this part thus gives your product development team the bandwidth to roll the product out to a small group of beta users. You start gathering early feedback. You incorporate this feedback into your product development plan, and then you roll out the final version of your product. How do you think your customer base will react to your product then?

“Eat a Live Frog Every Morning, and Nothing Worse Will Happen to You the Rest of the Day”- don’t go by the false sense of security and the fake impression of progress that comes from simply completing easy tasks. Instead, battle the hard things first mainly because hard things need more heads-down time. They also net in bigger rewards. I’m sure you’ll agree that writing a screenplay is much harder than answering twenty emails. But which one do you think will matter later?

So, don’t let your day get usurped by tasks that you can complete easily while you let the hard tasks become herculean behemoths. Work smart by just doing the hard tasks first.

Our Services

Digital Twin Platform | Healthcare App Development | IoT development services | Digital Product Development