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Contributed on January 24, 2020

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DevOps: Challenges while Adopting and How to Overcome Them

Blog: NASSCOM Official Blog

DevOps, by far, has emerged as common practice for many development companies around the world. The methodology has become famous quickly; thanks to the vast scope of innovation it provides and productivity as well as efficiency it ensures. Therefore, any company that has not yet adapted to this approach already feels the competitive pressure to do so. Whether you are a mobile app development company or a software development firm, the popularity must have already knocked at your door.

What prevents many companies from embracing DevOps approach? Well, there are some challenges and perceived roadblocks that make some businesses avoid adopting this approach. Let us explain some of these challenges and identify their possible solutions.

1. Addressing the development vs operations mindset

DevOps, as a development methodology, focuses on integrating multiple processes instead of breaking a business process into segregated silos. Instead of maintaining the same strong dividing wall between the two processes, it is more about boosting productivity, efficiency, and speed by winning over the old clichés.

With this methodology, both teams try to align their respective goals and try to deliver the best output. As per the operational demands, developers set their priorities, and at times as per the development needs of evaluating implementation in real business context operation team has to respond accordingly. Integrating both the teams while streamlining the entire process seems to be the most essential objective for the DevOps development objective.

Adding more value to this approach, many organizations are further embracing cross-functional teams with a focus on the product output rather than just managing the IT projects. This has emerged as a variant of the DevOps development methodology that allows companies to create a highly cross-functional team that can bring together different functionaries, including architecture, roadmap, design, development, implementation, and support. This approach also allows incorporating business representatives into the team.

2. Choosing the right DevOps tools

DevOps approach needs to streamline different processes like application development, testing, and deployment with a comprehensive vision. In this methodology, all these processes should work seamlessly in a streamlined and continuous manner with enormous scope for an iteration. But as different departments use different tools and applications, it becomes challenging to bring everyone on the same page concerning the set of tools.

Using a single automated system for both the developers and operations team can be ideal for facilitating more accessible communication and interaction between the two teams. Such a single set of tools and automated systems can help reduce the time for carrying out different processes by merely minimizing the repetitive tasks. This will also enhance the scope of sharing knowledge between two teams while streamlining the entire production cycle. Both the development and operations teams should get involved in choosing a perfect set of open-source tools that they can use throughout the project life cycle.

3. Choosing the ideal projects

Any new DevOps team may have the impression that a DevOps approach can be useful for every different project, but that is not the case. For every project, it may not be the right methodology and depending upon the project and based on some other considerations, one must take a call. Remember, in specific projects, and the DevOps approach can slow down the development to a great extent. DevOps, as a cross-functional methodology, may not fit every project. The challenge is to fit it into the ideal project in order to get the best out of this concept.

Let us understand the typical projects where DevOps methodology is the ideal fit. Well, in all those projects, where faster scaling up of the capacity and agility are vital considerations, it stands as the perfect choice. On the other hand, if an organization prefers using an older system; DevOps does not stand as the perfect methodology of choice.

Moreover, projects having a focus on planning and UX design may not always be the right fit for a DevOps approach. Typically, design and UX do not require constant improvement approach, instead, such projects find prototyping and established  UX design approach more effective.

4. The issue of the human resistance

There is a significant roadblock in DevOps projects in the form of human resistance. The shift to this approach from the traditional development methodology can trigger panic alerts among both developers and operations teams who suffer from static inertia or are reluctant to take the challenge of embracing something new by stepping outside of their comfort zone.

On the other hand, you would be wrong if you want to convince people overnight to embrace this approach. You must allow people to develop confidence over time. The team members should be gradually accustomed and trained with the DevOps approach to development. Instead of providing them a full DevOps project, one should allow them working with this approach on a substantial slice of an application involving the entire stack of technologies. As and when they know the benefits and find them necessary for projects, they can confidently embrace the approach for more projects.

5. Testing the application performance

Finally, the DevOps approach has never really undermined the importance of testing. With the continuously higher user expectations in terms of user experience and application performance, every application should undergo extensive testing. To build and release software products faster, you cannot just take the software testing lightly.

This approach has already proven to be highly effective on various parameters, but it has its limitations when it comes to bugs and errors. There is good news that the developers can now utilize a whole array of sophisticated performance testing tools to ensure optimum quality while maintaining development speed.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges mentioned above DevOps development approach is likely to remain popular for years to come simply because of the substantial cost benefits and pace of development this approach ensures.

Source: 5 Challenges while Adopting DevOps and How to Overcome Them

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