With each passing day, technology becomes more tightly woven into both our working and non-working lives. The more consumers and companies increase their comfort and reliance on technology, the higher the end-user expectations become.
They don’t want to wait months for new software updates, and they don’t want to wait for bug fixes. As an added challenge, they also want the release process to be quick, painless and transparent.
The need to release quickly and often is vital to business success, as clearly stated in the Accelerate book. But of equal importance is ensuring that quality does not suffer as release speeds increase.
Let’s look at four key elements that will help you release software faster without compromising quality: DevOps Teams, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Infrastructure as Code.
Agile DevOps Teams
DevOps Teams, and the DevOps methodology as a whole, are the glue that holds the other elements together. Unless you adopt the tenets of a DevOps approach, the remaining pieces will be challenging to implement, if not impossible.
In traditional IT departments, Development and Operations were separate entities, siloed departments that communicated only during handoffs. A development team is responsible for writing and testing the code, and the operations team is responsible for the servers and infrastructure needed to deploy a software release. There was a wall between the two groups, with code and issues and instructions getting passed back and forth over that wall.
Silos create barriers and slow down processes. With DevOps teams, you remove those silos and introduce a tight integration between Development and Operations; often, members of a DevOps team will perform both functions rather than specializing in one area. Responsibility is shared, pain is shared, knowledge is shared.
With DevOps, an autonomous team is responsible for the whole software development and software release life cycle for a product, ensuring that you can release new features and fix defects faster and respond quicker to customers’ needs. Without DevOps, rapid-release elements such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are not possible.
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is a core aspect of the DevOps methodology and can result in massive time savings in your software release process. With CI, small, iterative code changes are merged back into the main code branch continuously — daily at the very least — and then subjected to automated tests to immediately detect issues.
Usually, more than one developer will be working from the same code base at the same time. Without CI, these developers will work in isolation for long stretches. When it is time to merge the code back into the central repository, there are going to inevitably be conflicts. Some of these might be found right away, some later in manual testing, and some would slip through to production. This is time-consuming, error-prone and costly.
CI changes that process, speeding integration and catching defects early and at a higher rate. First, merging code daily ensures that the developer’s code will be much smaller, making it easier to test, find, and fix issues. Second, when developers check in their code, an extensive array of automated tests are run to detect errors and conflicts, rather than relying on manual testing.
Lastly, once the code is successfully merged, your main branch is considered stable. If there are issues with the code, it is unmerged while the developer makes changes. Again, your main branch is stable. This stability means that you are much better positioned for Continuous Delivery.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery builds on the outputs of Continuous Integration, focusing on the final stages required for deployment to production. In this stage, your DevOps team is building executables and then pushing them to a staging environment closely resembling a production release. Each step of the way, automated tests are run to quickly detect critical bugs. Because the DevOps team is responsible for all steps in the release management process, these issues can be immediately addressed.
The goal of Continuous Delivery is to ensure that, at any given moment, you can deploy a final version to production. Having already gone through all of your automated tests in your staging environment, the actual deployment is quick and effortless.
Continuous Delivery often gets confused with Continuous Deployment, another DevOps practice where you constantly push out releases to your users. While Continuous Deployment is a worthy goal, it does not necessarily fit all businesses. For example, if you have large enterprise customers or your customers operate in a regulated environment, they may not be in a position to accept continuous releases. However, it’s essential to keep in mind that even the late adopters will eventually catch up.
Continuous Delivery doesn’t mean you are constantly pushing out new releases to customers; it just means that you are always able to do so. So when your CEO comes to you and tells you that the new feature you just finished needs to get released to secure the biggest sale in your company’s history, you can comply without stress or panic.
Infrastructure as Code
IaC is a crucial part of your Continuous Delivery efforts. Infrastructure as code redefines the computing infrastructure deployment (such as server or storage for instance) as source code rather than a manual process, letting you quickly and even automatically, spin up new servers as necessary.
Aside from the obvious speed advantage, this also increases the integrity of your servers by eliminating manual process errors — no more downtime because someone forgot a setting. Plus, you ensure the same setup every time as the source code is maintained in your code repository and any changes are tightly controlled.
Keys to Faster Software Releases
To successfully increase the speed of your software development life cycle, you must have a culture that breaks down silos and supports collaboration, with everyone working together to deliver a quality product. You must forgo all of those time-consuming manual processes and embrace automation at every step of the process.
DevOps teams help create the Modern Software Culture necessary for fast releases. Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Infrastructure as Code are the specific practices made possible by that collaborative culture that then utilizes automation to dramatically increase the speed and quality of your releases.
Determine where you are the weakest in the above areas with the help of an external partner, and then look at their recommendations to improve future releases. Because if you don’t shift to meet your customers’ needs, they might soon start looking for a replacement solution.
