10 ways DevOps can help reduce technical debt

 Technical debt is inevitable for most organizations, but DevOps practices can help minimize it. Consider these tips. 

Technical debt is unavoidable. And if it is not addressed, it can hamper your development process and product quality. While it costs time and money to fix accrued technical debt, prevention is better than cure. According to Gartner, infrastructure and operations leaders who can actively manage and reduce technical debt will achieve 50 percent faster delivery times.

DevOps has emerged as the solution to many challenges in the IT industry. It can also address the technical debt challenge. Here are ten ways DevOps can help your business manage and reduce technical debt.

1. Test in earlier stages of software development

A key DevOps practice, shift-left testing or testing early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), helps find and prevent errors early in the delivery process. It includes unit tests, static code analysis, code coverage analysis, and other code-level practices to catch errors at the earliest stage possible, when they cost the least to fix. 

Additionally, testing as you develop improves code design and makes it easier for development teams to understand in the future. Thus, early testing reduces technical debt and lowers costs in the long term.

2. Identify and solve major problems first

The DevOps lifecycle has lean, short feedback cycles and faster iterations due to enhanced collaboration between teams. Therefore, bugs, usability issues, and security vulnerabilities do not have to wait until the next feature release to get a fix. And major problems that can impact users or operations are fixed immediately.

You can optimize the process further by categorizing or ranking problems from high to low priority to determine which issues to resolve first. Then have all hands on deck to solve the major problems first, but do not leave any for later.

3. Establish better collaboration between development and operations teams

In most cases, technical debt occurs because development teams take shortcuts to meet tight deadlines and struggle with constant changes. But better collaboration between dev and ops can shorten SDLC, fasten deployments, and increase their frequency. Moreover, CI/CD and continuous testing make it easier for teams to deal with changes. Overall, the collaborative culture encourages code reviews, good coding practices, and robust testing with mutual help.

4. Emphasize more automation

When you automate routine time-consuming tasks and tasks that tend to be more prone to errors, your teams have more time to repay technical debt.

Moreover, automation embedded into CI/CD with automated testing, automated build, and infrastructure as code (IaC) helps identify debt earlier and enables continuous debt repayment. It also enforces code quality standards. Thus, automation can relieve current technical debt while also avoiding future debt.

5. Don't leave it for later

Technical debt is best controlled when managed continuously, which becomes easier with DevOps. As it facilitates constant communication, teams can track debt, facilitate awareness and resolve it as soon as possible. Team leaders can also include technical debt review into backlog and schedule maintenance sprints to deal with it promptly. Moreover, DevOps reduces the chances of incomplete or deferred tasks in the backlog, helping prevent technical debt.

6. Establish a DevOps culture

A true DevOps culture can be the key to managing technical debt over long periods. DevOps culture encourages strong collaboration between cross-functional teams, provides autonomy and ownership, and practices continuous feedback and improvement. It provides an effective platform to track technical debt, calculate, and communicate it to other teams. Moreover, DevOps culture can be used to educate and inform developers of the kind of codes that introduce bugs in the future and raise the code quality.

7. Set precise DevOps standards

Well-defined DevOps standards enable you to create quality gates on each code check-in, then run tests and deploy. It saves your teams from repetitive, error-prone manual tasks and optimizes their development efforts.

Enforcing DevOps standards also prevent your teams from taking process shortcuts (like cutting corners in writing code), which is one of the biggest contributors to technical debt. Thus, precise DevOps standards can maintain a high level of productivity and quality while keeping team morale high, indirectly saving money for your company.

8. Make the deployment process smoother

A smoother deployment process can make it easy for the DevOps team to identify and reduce technical debt. You can consider employing containers to make deployments easier. Containers are lightweight and portable, which simplifies application development and deployment. Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes automate container lifecycle in production, enabling your teams to focus on high-value tasks of refactoring applications or trimming technical debt.

9. Implement API-first model

How application components communicate is also important in addressing technical debt because technical debt is often caused by different systems accessing services and data in ways other teams do not expect.

Implementing APIs makes interfaces more visible and increases the durability of communications. Due to loose coupling between applications, an API-based model enables teams to make changes quickly without impacting existing structures. Moreover, any team that later interacts with a service in question has a clearly defined set of expectations. As a result, it is easier to roll out features/changes with less technical debt.

10. Deploy self-service pipelines for common tasks

Another strategic way to reduce technical debt is to automate or streamline tasks that add time and cost to the development process but do not add value to the product. Such tasks can include meeting compliance requirements, activities reports, and work handoffs from one person to another.

Moreover, you can implement self-service pipelines for common tasks such as compiling code, running tests, building containers, etc. It saves time for teams, enabling them to contribute their efforts to managing and reducing technical debt.

DevOps cannot address all the challenges around technical debt. But it can detect debt early, reduce bugs, and control code quality, which slows debt accumulation and helps keep it below a maintainable threshold. And while you may not be able to address all of your technical debt right away, these tips will certainly help you tackle technical debt challenges efficiently.

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Article source: https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2022/6/devops-reduce-technical-debt

A Successful DevOps Strategy Is More Than Just Technology

To start, DevOps is exactly what it sounds like — a combination of software development and IT operations that shortens the product lifecycle and delivers a higher quality operational performance, benefiting the company and customer alike. But it’s more than that — it’s a cultural shift and a methodology that expands upon agile and lean software development principles in a manner necessary to drive the shift from an on-premise, product-centric culture to the SaaS, service-centric alternative that is the keystone of most modern technology businesses. Top companies in industries from retail to technology use DevOps to improve efficiency and accelerate the distribution of product enhancements. It’s not a question if DevOps can help your company upgrade its product cycle; it’s a question of how well you can implement it into your organization.

My company has embraced DevOps to not only improve the IT processes inside our organization, but to also reshape the teamwork and mindset of everyone involved in product development. This, in turn, has benefited many of Experian’s partners and clients, as it has enabled them to leverage fast delivery of value and enjoy strong, resilient service in production. DevOps considers people, processes and technology. By combining IT operations and development, companies can optimize the flow of ideas to product creation — but this also requires a cultural shift in the company. You can always update technology, but unless you also change the organization and improve the way the teams work together, DevOps will be incomplete.

The key is giving your employees the ability to innovate and the tools and trust to do it quickly. DevOps ties software development with rapid IT service delivery, leveraging end-to-end agile, lean practices in the context of a whole-system-oriented approach. The mindset that is required from everyone in the flow of value creation is a focus on how to achieve that system-oriented outcome. As mentioned, the other key element to successfully implementing DevOps is technology itself, especially automation tools that make the complete flow and pipeline of development and testing repeatable and reliable.

When we test our products, we use Amazon Web Services — a company that has been outspoken about how it uses DevOps to shorten the time it takes to improve its servers and other solutions. AWS accomplished this by breaking down its large teams into far smaller but autonomous units which move faster. Previously, its development and operations teams were huge entities each working on one task, robbing them of innovation time. By making teams smaller and giving them autonomy, changes and improvements came faster, and each team assumes ownership of its contributions. Collaboration improved, and AWS also invested heavily in automation and metrics, so it was easier and faster to monitor, log and trace issues for improvement and fix mistakes.

There is much to learn from AWS when it comes to DevOps. Large teams became smaller, but by assuming ownership of their tasks, each team knew what it was responsible for. By placing operations and development together, it eliminated finger-pointing and improved collaboration. It almost makes each small team a business that has a specific task, and when code is ready for gamma testing, it is vigorously tested for potential failure, so potential problems are addressed before it is deployed. Once implemented into production, the code is tested on a single function so bugs only impact that specific feature. If that succeeds, it is slowly rolled out to more functions until it is globally available.

Compare this with the DevOps in your own organization. How long does it take to get new or improved features to market? When you hit a roadblock, does a team or department take responsibility or do different developers blame each other for the problem? Are development and operations working together, or is everyone siloed? Are your new product launches consistently delayed due to insufficient data or analytics to chart progress?

Improving the DevOps process can make a sea of change across every part of your product’s lifecycle, and what’s most fascinating is that the most important elements do not require a huge IT investment. Changing the way you configure your teams, streamlining the process and encouraging task ownership will benefit your employees, who are now more experiencing a work environment shift due to Covid-19. Getting your products out faster with greater testing and analytics will benefit your salesforce and your customers. 

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Article Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/01/31/a-successful-devops-strategy-is-more-than-just-technology/?sh=5ff821903193

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The DevOps revolution is upon us, but why? According to Patrick Debois, one of the masterminds behind the movement, the DevOps environment grew as a reaction against some of the common problems that the IT industry faces, including the siloing of team members and the work they do, the uncertainty of introducing new features or deploying changes, the difficulty of finding and addressing defects, and the rise of bottlenecks within the software development lifecycle (SDLC). 

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