DevOps: communication, collaboration and integration

DevOps (Development Operations) is a set of practices  inspired by Agile and lean mentalities and based on active collaboration and communication between all the actors involved in the business to release software continuously.

This approach is useful to create an effective and fast working environment, which allows companies to receive faster feedback and change products accordingly to a more targeted and effective way.

At the beginning it was adopted only by large companies related to the web world (Netflix, Google and other giants of the industry) but lately some of its principles have been introduced in many traditional companies that want to adapt to the market and keep up with the times.

DevOps is a very varied and multifaceted universe, but there are some basic axioms recognized by the whole community:

• Continuous integration and testing: developers must integrate the code several times a day. Then, It is  checked from time to time by an automatic test system to detect any problems in advance.In this way, every time a new feature is introduced,  the team will be sure that it will not conflict with the previous environment and will not compromise the use of the application.
• Continuous delivery and deployment: developers must build the software so that it can potentially be released at any time. This is possible by standardizing the configuration of the various infrastructures.
• Continuous operations: developers must manage software changes so as not to prevent end users from using the software.
• Continuous assessment: the developers must work on the product based mainly on some kind of feedback in particular:
  – Feedback loops, as the recording of user experience throughout the life cycle of the product.
  – Planning priorization, as the assignment of different priorities to the feedback at the time of their reception.

Adopting this flexible assembly approach, the workflow will become more elastic and fluid, the releases will be smaller and more frequent (and therefore more controllable), time to market will be improved and you will notice less waste of time and lower costs in the long term.