Three Ways A Strong DevOps Mindset And Continuous Improvement Processes Lead To Scalable Growth For Software Companies

As many software startup founders and executive teams can attest, reaching the stage where the business achieves scalable growth is an incredible milestone. A critical factor in achieving this is establishing a strong DevOps mindset and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes, as these can be the connecting points across multiple business functions, including operations, product research and development, deployment, seamless upgrades and monitoring.

Over the past 15 years, as our company has grown and evolved to where we are today, a robust culture that cultivates a DevOps mindset and CI/CD processes has been key to ensuring that deployments and platform upgrades are completed accurately and in a timely manner across a growing client base.

However, establishing an efficient DevOps program isn’t without its challenges. One hurdle for many software providers can be the pace of deploying automation because updates need to be tested and evaluated, which can impact how quickly automation is adopted.

Another challenge is creating a standardized deployment model that can be applied to any project to reduce disparity across install bases and determine whether retrofitting is needed to bring prior installations up to the current processes. However, it’s worth the time and investment, as some of the business advantages include boosting innovation and productivity and improving product quality and delivery.

Here are three key insights that can help software companies create efficient and scalable CI/CD processes:

Set a strong foundation.

One of the first steps to creating scalable CI/CD processes is applying best practices to set a strong foundation. A proper naming convention with automated environment profiles, solid source-code control and branching strategy is crucial to ensure uniformity across install bases when fixing issues or delivering new features and updates.

Tracking and reporting are also significant because having up-to-date information on what’s in flight, what’s backlogged and what’s completed is crucial to making timely decisions and understanding the performance of the CI/CD implementation. Monitoring and autohealing features can help identify proactive maintenance opportunities or allow swift recovery from deployment issues.

Where there is an opportunity to do so, also take an automation-first approach when testing or delivering bug fixes or new features, as this approach helps to maintain standards across a diverse install base.

Optimize processes with CI/CD tools.

To help ensure a successful rollout, the right CI/CD tools and training programs are critical to ensure standardization of toolsets and processes across teams. CI/CD tools can help track multiple factors, from requirements to deployments, and enable teams to know exactly when a requirement was implemented and deployed to a specific install base.

These tools help teams to make quick decisions and even execute a rollback plan at scale if needed. These tools also enable teams to better meet KPIs such as platform service availability, regression-free deployments and ensuring maintenance is performed within estimated timeframes.

Create the right environment.

Given today’s ever-changing technology landscape, it’s important to implement a continuous learning program to make sure all team members are up to speed on the latest best practices, workflows or pipelines, and DevOps tool enhancements.

The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle is an effective way to apply learnings in real time because teams are able to develop a gameplan to address an issue, implement a test to determine if the solution is effective, analyze the results and apply what’s learned to take additional action, then repeat the cycle for continued improvement.

By prioritizing ongoing education, a team’s skill set stays sharp and ready to deploy the latest technologies. Also, consider developing strong partnerships with cloud providers, as they can help your business conduct proofs of concepts (POCs) when your teams are ready to vet new technologies.

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