How do you work? Transform your culture and practices to get the most out of DevOps
Effective DevOps allows you to deliver high-quality software quickly and reliably. But it’s so much more than that. It’s about building a collaborative culture between your teams to improve efficiency; relying on automation to cut down repetitive, manual tasks; not being afraid to fail so you can spark innovation; and looking to learn and improve the way things are done. Embracing the following working practices can help create a thriving DevOps culture – from cross-functional teams to an incredible developer experience. Take a look…
A cultural phenomenon
Want to learn more about all the topics covered here? Download our eBook to deep dive into DevOps culture and ways of working: Mastering digital transformation: the power of DevOps practices and culture to supercharge your software delivery
Build cross-functional, top-performing teams
What is it?
A cross-functional DevOps team includes individuals from different disciplines, departments, and roles working together for a more successful project, including development, operations, testing, and security. They each contribute their expertise and skills to innovate and achieve a common goal or task, from Scrum masters to those skilled in using DevOps tools.
What are the benefits?
- A more collaborative culture – break down silos through group decision-making, team building, and developing a shared language.
- Problem-solving done right – putting multiple heads together helps you get to the best outcomes more quickly, reduce errors, and speed up delivery.
- Drive innovation – encourage creative, innovative ideas from everywhere within the organisation by broadening perspectives and boosting problem-solving skills.
- Encourage knowledge sharing – people learn and develop new skills from their team for a continuous learning environment where everyone benefits.
- High-performing teams – open communication has a huge impact on performance, and people bring these skills back to their own departments to revolutionise how everyone works.
Highly efficient cross-functional teams are key to unlocking the power of DevOps.
Take a look at these resources to learn how to identify, recruit, train, and support cross-functional team members and leaders.
Six signs of highly efficient DevOps teams
Optimised IT, speed automation, and enriched developer experiences signify efficient DevOps teams.
Are your dev teams moving at the same pace?
Get your dev teams moving at the same speed, including the integral role of DevOps.
Elevate agile and DevOps with cross-functional teams
Harnessing the power of cross-functional teams to level-up agile and DevOps.
Create an exceptional developer experience
What is it?
Developer experience or DevEx is all about applying ‘user experience’ thinking to development teams to make interactions seamless and remove complexity from tools, platforms, and processes. A poor DevEx can lead to siloed working, a lack of knowledge sharing, and too much time spent on time-wasting non-coding work.
What are the benefits?
Attract and retain the best talent – as word gets around that you prioritise DevEx, you'll always have a stable team of great people to help you achieve your goals.
- Power up productivity – if it's easy to get the work done, developers can incorporate customer feedback more and complete projects more quickly, driving efficiency.
- Supported staff – with great DevEx, new developers won't fall by the wayside and can get up to speed on tools and techniques more quickly – great for them, great for the business.
- More time coding – developers can focus on delivering solutions without worrying about documentation and infrastructure, typical stumbling blocks that hold projects up.
How does your DevEx stack up?
We share five ways you can strengthen your developer experience right away.
Embrace developer self-service
What is it?
Self-service uses curated tooling, automation, optimised processes, and best-practice approaches to reduce the brain power required for non-core development tasks, improve productivity and efficiency, and ensure your people can spend more time innovating. With all the tools they need in one place, developers can access resources quickly and easily to take care of infrastructure, version control, and configuration management.
What are the benefits?
- Be more innovative – with all the resources and tools they need, developers can get started on new projects right away, freeing them up to experiment, build prototypes, and get new ideas out to customers more quickly.
- Reduce bottlenecks – with automation and self-service in play, developers can resolve more of their own issues. With IT teams less impacted by support requests, dependencies will drop, and more time can be spent on strategic initiatives.
- Cut costs – greater reliance on automation and resource optimisation generally lead to lower operational expenses.
- Keep developers happy – with more autonomy and less painstaking work, your developers will enjoy greater job satisfaction, increasing retention rates.
- Safer software and a scalable service – standardise processes not only ensure your software is safer and more reliable, but they’re easier to scale up as your organisation grows too.
Start serving yourself
Start reading to dive deeper into the big whats, hows, and whys of developer self-service.
Invest in an internal developer portal
What is it?
An IDP is a web-based platform that provides developers with easy access to a wide array of resources, tools, and documentation. This centralised hub brings together all your company's tools, like code repositories, documentation libraries, an API catalogue, software development kits, and more. It's also where developers can collaborate, share knowledge, and find the information they need to build software more efficiently.
What are the benefits?
Everything they need, all in one place – with easy access to coding guidelines, API references, and architectural overviews, developers don't waste time finding and figuring out the tools they need to succeed.
- Easy to onboard – IDPs make life much easier for new devs joining your teams. They can get up to speed quickly and start generating value straight away.
- Kickstart projects easily – developers don't need to wait for a meeting to work on a new idea. They can use existing templates, tried and tested dependencies, and shared code to get started.
- Learn more – devs can ask each other for help and share their knowledge, which encourages everyone to keep learning and up their game.
- Effortless collaboration – IDPs make it easier for everyone to get involved, review code, and integrate changes for a much more collaborative approach.
And for your organisation…
IPDs are great for your developers, but they also help your organisation secure the best talent, reduce response times, strengthen coding consistency, drive innovation, and create a best-practice environment with essential controls for governance and security embedded into your process from the start.
Portal ready?
Discover how you can unlock efficiency and collaboration using internal developer portals.
Feel the power of the platform
What is it?
Platform as a service (PaaS) is when a third-party provider delivers the infrastructure, tools, and services your developers need to build and deploy applications. They take care of designing, building, operating, monitoring, and maintaining secure, scalable, and manageable platforms. This frees your people up to concentrate on more meaningful, innovative work, helping you streamline internal processes and grow your business.
What are the benefits?
- Increase scalability, speed, and flexibility – be more responsive to market changes, scale to accommodate demand, and be prepared for the future with the latest hardware and software underpinning your applications.
- Cut IT costs – with PaaS, you won't invest in unnecessary infrastructure or worry about managing multiple software licences or server space. And upfront costs are minimal, too.
- Spark innovation – with the ability to find and fix bugs outside the local environment and test configurations on different machines, your team will have the freedom to try out new, exciting ideas.
- Make more of your time – with platform engineering covered and automation in place, your people don't need to devote time to building or maintaining systems, so they can crack on with what they do best.
- Build better products – with no worries about infrastructure or operating systems, they can focus on build, leading to better products out to market faster, lower costs to you, and increased business agility.
Putting PaaS in the spotlight
Learn more about what PaaS is all about and how it impacts IT costs and business agility.
On-demand webinar: Developers can do everything— using Self-Service and IDPs for fast flow
Join our expert Matt Saunders as he explores enhancing developer productivity through automation in software development. Highlighting the inefficiencies of manual processes, he discusses Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) to streamline workflows, promote best practices, and empower developers. Learn how a culture of automation, testing, and treating developers as customers can foster a more efficient, productive environment.
How can Adaptavist help?
Our transformation experts can break down the complexities of advanced CI/CD with in-depth knowledge of the tools, processes, and cultural change you need to get your organisation where it needs to be. We've got experience implementing and managing some of the biggest tools in DevOps, helping hundreds of organisations step up software development.
DevOps Maturity Assessment
We take a deep dive into your DevOps maturity, assessing your people, process, and tools using our expert-developed model.
What you get:
- A top-to-bottom assessment of your people (including team structures), processes, and tools.
- A current state solution architecture, so you can understand where you’re at and where the gaps are.
- Suggested areas for improvement.
- Next steps to help get your teams up to speed, including learning paths for teams.
Our expertise
Adaptavist partners with best-in-class technologies that help organisations deliver better software, faster. We build DevOps toolchains based on business needs, and can integrate tools that work across the entire software development lifecycle.
We are an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, GitLab Select Channel Partner & Professional Services Certified Partner, and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner meaning we are qualified to expertly give you advice with your DevOps solutions.
Our own DevOps toolbox
From transformative apps that help optimise and streamline your DevOps practice, to Venue.sh – a DevEx-focused DevOps platform that helps teams work collaboratively to build and deploy code to any destination, The Adaptavist Group’s solutions extend beyond our services and partnerships.
Ready to take control of your DevOps culture and change the way your people work for the better?
Get in touch with Adaptavist’s experts today.