3 pillars of devops success for 2018, part 2

In part one, I discussed value streams the benefits of monitoring value to better satisfy customers.

In order to manage value streams, however, organizations must have complete visibility into the software development lifecycle. And not only that, but this view needs to provide the business with context for making decisions. In fact, DevOps would not be possible without visibility.

To have a good understanding and “view” of the value stream, organizations need quite a bit of information. Value streams exist, but few enterprise leaders and their management teams have visibility where they should.  No one can deny that the software development lifecycle is an interconnected chain.  Each stage is essential to the whole, and IT leaders must be able to manage and easily view the dependencies and many moving parts. And, let’s not forget the tool chain. Often individual tools have a good amount of data that must be captured in order to have a complete understanding of what’s working and what is not.

The need for visibility not only goes for the beginning phases of development, but also for monitoring and measuring a product after it’s deployed. These measurements provide critical data necessary to build context around every process—particularly those that are automated. Tracking events, for example, can provide useful feedback to managers about how to service a deployed product and which resources to use.

It is not simply a matter of collecting measurements and metrics, however. The data needs to be put to use in a centralized, contextual view in order to be useful for intelligent business decisions. This unleashes a wealth of insight to leadership teams regarding bottlenecks, compliance concerns (we will discuss in the next post), inefficiencies, etc. This is particularly important in today’s working world when teams are distributed and often siloed within the organization.

The more context surrounding each decision, the more intelligent those decisions will be. This is particularly important for driving automation. The more context, the better the decisions and ultimately the more customized the experience for the customer or end user.

Context is everything in customer service and the bigger the context around each customer, the better applications can cater to that individual’s needs. Building context within the software development lifecycle starts with first, measuring KPIs and second, interpreting them.

CollabNet has been talking visibility for years. It’s one of the key strengths of the award-winning collaboration platform TeamForge, used by customers to build some of the world’s most ingenious software applications. Connecting the complex software development lifecycle in a way that scales Agile throughout the enterprise has never been more essential and organizations are realizing that.

The benefits of visibility across people, tools and processes in software development and delivery cannot be emphasized enough, and with latest cutting-edge technologies in measuring KPIs, metrics and event monitoring, the contextual view leaders can now have of their products and services is a game changer for the industry.

Organizations cannot afford to operate with a murky view of what’s going on in their development, testing, QA and release teams. The costs are too high and that is something we will discuss next time in part III.

CollabNet, at the helm of those technologies I mentioned in the paragraph above—monitoring KPIs and event tracking—understands better than anyone in the industry the importance of clear, scalable and contextual visibility.

Visibility will continue to be a theme for DevOps efforts as we move forward into 2018 and you will soon see many vendors tacking this word onto solutions.

Next time, in my third and final post of the series, we will dig into compliance, governance and security. We will discuss the urgency within the industry to provide software that meet regulations and ways companies can achieve high standards without the headache and avoid devastating consequences of failure. Stay tuned and please share your thoughts in the comments section below.