How DevOps Maturity Can Help Your Organisation Stay Agile

DevOps teams are essential for organisations that value speed, agility, and quality in the digital age. Adidas, for example, uses DevOps to significantly reduce its time to deploy and operate more like a high performing software company.

DevOps maturity is a measure of how advanced an organisation is in adopting and implementing DevOps practices. It is measured based on several factors, including the level of automation, collaboration, and communication between teams, the level of integration between tools and systems, the frequency and reliability of software releases, and the level of monitoring and feedback mechanisms in place.

Companies face challenges in building DevOps capabilities, such as a shortage of tech talent resulting in a lack of technical expertise. As such, they need a solution that ties everything together holistically. In this regard, low-code application development can help overcome these challenges by streamlining DevOps.

1. Seamless transition to cloud-native development

Organisations need to embrace cloud-native development to gain the speed, scale, and flexibility needed for industry disruption, continued relevance, and business resilience. They need to become mature, high-performing DevOps teams that have mastered cloud and elite software delivery. By implementing sound DevOps methodologies, one can reap the benefits of cloud-native applications without being burdened by the workload of managing them. There is no universal solution for DevOps. No one can offer a fool-proof method for deploying and maintaining top-notch applications, as each one is unique in its own way. Nonetheless, there are tools available that can simplify the DevOps process and make it less overwhelming.

2. Automate to innovate 

Automation is essential to achieving high performance in DevOps and can be used to streamline the entire software development process. Low-code development platforms have therefore gained significant traction in recent years with its ability to automate routine tasks such as testing and deployment, helping team members focus on more value-added activities. Low-code also allows developers to create applications with minimal hand-coding, relying instead on visual interfaces and pre-built components, and even offers automated coding suggestions to undertake app-building with ease. This approach not only accelerates the development process but also empowers a broader range of professionals, including business analysts and citizen developers, to contribute to application development.

3.   Embrace Agile Practices

Companies that want to stay competitive need to maintain a high performance in DevOps. This means prioritising continuous integration,delivery, and deployment s to deliver software in a fast and efficient manner, allowing for rapid feedback and course correction. Low-code application development has proven to be a game-changer for enterprises seeking to enhance their responsiveness in today's fast-paced business environment. With a radically simplified interface, low-code enables shorter go-to-market timelines, cross-functional collaboration, and provides the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.

4. Continuous Improvement in Software

Continuous improvement is essential to achieving high performance in DevOps.  Metrics should be established to measure the performance of the software development process, and feedback should be collected from stakeholders, including customers and end-users. By continuously improving the software development process, teams can achieve higher levels of efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction.

Globally companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Uber are engaging in continuous integration and delivery so that they can deploy multiple times in a day or on demand. It typically takes less than an hour to bring changes to production and less than an hour to restore services.

Combining low-code with AI empowers teams to swiftly troubleshoot and identify performance issues. AI-driven low-code can autonomously analyze system data, and providea visual platform to implement corrective actions, streamlining the resolution process with precision and efficiency.

This allows companies to accelerate deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service and reduce failure rate, ultimately protecting their reputation and bottom line.

5. Invest in Training and Development

Investing in the training and development of team members is essential to building a high-performing DevOps team. Team members should be encouraged to develop their skills and knowledge through training and certification programs. It is also important to provide opportunities for team members to collaborate with each other and share their knowledge and experience.

Building a high-performing DevOps team operating at the upper end of the maturity scale requires a focus on collaboration, communication, automation, agile practices, toolchain implementation, continuous improvement, training and development, and a positive team culture. Low-code can further support this by facilitating the creation of diverse, skilled DevOps teams with its low barrier to entry, and intuitive visual interfaces.  

By following these best practices, organisations can achieve high performance in DevOps and deliver software quickly, reliably, and efficiently while maintaining a high level of quality.

Author: Mark Weaser, Vice President at OutSystems Asia-Pacific