The 6 Cs of the DevOps Cycle

Mid to large software development projects involve many people with multiple teams, resources, tools, and stages of development. They all need to be managed and streamlined in a manner to get not only the desired product but also make sure that in the future, it is easy to manage and maintain under evolving circumstances. There are quite a number of project management models and techniques that organizations typically follow. DevOps is one of them where the agencies take an agile approach to the software development process with the primary objective of continuous improvement. DevOps is easy when you know your organization and can adopt changes easily and there is a right attitude to make DevOps come true in your organization. Learn more about the DevOps toolchain.

The 6 Cs are the best practices of DevOps that are typically followed by any organization to develop faster and provide more reliable updates to the customer.

1. Continuous Business Planning

Continuous business planning adds to the agility of the development process and allows teams to make smarter and quicker decisions. The problems and delays that occur or may occur can be quickly identified and planned accordingly to adapt to the changing circumstances. Customer requirements can be anticipated and stay one step ahead of their needs. For example, the team may decide to remove a particular feature of the product that they may have been implementing and reallocate the resources towards a different feature that the market research suggests is customer preference now. The changes are quick with continuous planning. Also, continuous planning helps in anticipating potential risks and dependencies. The teams can take proactive measures to handle any kind of situation that occurs.

2. Collaborative Development

DevOps completely eradicates the gap between development and operation. It helps in establishing close communication among all the team members and facing success or failure together. Each member is a part and parcel of all the intricacies of the development life cycle. Any team can come forward to solve the problem that may have occurred. For example, a software has been deployed in a remote location and a glitch has been reported that requires immediate attention. The team quickly takes up the issue live with all members actively participating. They spend hours analyzing the issue and provide an immediate workaround to solve the problem quickly. This is what collaborative development does: creating an environment of close communication among teams which is crucial for any successful operation.

3. Continuous Testing

Testing is performed at regular intervals to reflect any changes made to the code. It is a part of the software delivery pipeline to get quick feedback on the changes made in the code repository. The central idea behind continuous testing is to quickly identify the problem, inform the development team, and solve it as soon as possible. Continuous testing is not only vital to the delivery of a reliable product to the customer but also adds to the pace of continuous improvement with an efficient use of the feedback loop by the development team.

4. Continuous Release and Deployment

With the continuous release of new features, bug fixes and improvements can quickly and consistently be delivered. The primary focus of continuous release is to automate and streamline the process of delivery of code changes in the production environment. The build and testing processes are automated with continuous integration (CI) as part of the continuous release. Although the primary aim of both processes is to increase the speed, frequency, and reliability of software release, there is a subtle difference between continuous release and continuous deployment. The choice between continuous release and continuous deployment depends on the needs of the development team, the requirements of the software, and the risks involved. In continuous release, the decision to deployment is typically a manual process while in continuous deployment it is completely automated. Deployment is done automatically as soon as any code changes are passed through testing. Learn more about process flow for DevOps deployments.

5. Continuous Monitoring

This is needed to monitor changes and address errors and mistakes spontaneously whenever they happen. It is an automated process of early detection of compliance issues that may occur at any stage of the DevOps process. For example, as an application deployed in the cloud, the DevOps security team must be aware of and continuously monitor any sort of security vulnerabilities that are present or may occur without compromising the privacy of the customer who is using it for their business. Not only error or security, continuous monitoring includes any area that requires attention and provides feedback for immediate rectification.

6. Customer Feedback and Optimization

This allows for an immediate response from your customers for your product and its features and helps you modify accordingly. Feedback is very important for continuous improvement. The feedback loop works at all aspects of the delivery process such as quality metrics, customer satisfaction, experience and sentiments, service level agreement, data environment, etc. Optimization is vital to a reliable and efficient software product that adheres to the quality metrics of the organization's standard. It aims at the needs of the hour and functions exactly to the customer's requirement. The feedback loop and continuous monitoring provide valuable input for continuous optimization of the software.

Conclusion

DevOps originates from Enterprise Software Management and Agile Software Methodology with the purpose of automating most, if not all, the process from planning to deployment of the development lifecycle. A good DevOps organization takes care of these 6Cs. Although this is not a must-have model, it is one of the more sophisticated models. CD pipelines, CI/CD tools, and containers make things easy. When you want to practice DevOps, having a microservices architecture makes more sense.