Oniyosys DevOps Methodology Testing: helping developers and small teams work smarter

DevOps is the offspring of agile software development – born from the need to keep up with the increased software velocity and throughput agile methods have achieved. Advancements in agile culture and methods over the last decade exposed the need for a more holistic approach to the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle.

What is DevOps?

DevOps – a combination of Development & Operations – is a software development methodology which looks to integrate all the software development functions from development to operations within the same cycle.

This calls for higher level of coordination within the various stakeholders in the software development process (namely Development, QA & Operations)

So an ideal DevOps cycle would start from:

• The dev writing code
• Building & deploying of binaries on a QA environment
• Executing test cases and finally
• Deploying on to Production in one smooth integrated flow.
• Obviously, this approach places great emphasis on automation of build, deployment and testing. Use of Continuous Integration (CI) tools, automation testing tools become a norm in a DevOps cycle.

What Is the Goal of DevOps?

Improve collaboration between all stakeholders from planning through delivery and automation of the delivery process in order to: 

• Improve deployment frequency
• Achieve faster time to market
•  Lower failure rate of new releases
• Shorten lead time between fixes
• Improve mean time to recovery
• According to the 2015 State of DevOps Report, “high-performing IT organizations deploy 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster.”
• A Common Pre-DevOps Scenario
• The software team meets prior to starting a new software project. The team includes developers, testers, operations and support professionals. This team plans how to create working software that is ready for deployment.

Each day new code is deployed as the developers complete it. Automated testing ensures the code is ready to be deployed. After the code passes all the automated testing it is deployed to a small number of users. The new code is monitored for a short period to ensure there are no unforeseen problems and it is stable. The new code is then proliferated to the remaining users once the monitoring shows that it is stable. Many, if not all, of the steps after planning and development are done with no human intervention.

What Are the Phases of DevOps Maturity?

There are several phases to DevOps maturity; here are a few of the key phases you need to know.

Waterfall Development

Before continuous integration, development teams would write a bunch of code for three to four months. Then those teams would merge their code in order to release it. The different versions of code would be so different and have so many changes that the actual integration step could take months. This process was very unproductive.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is the practice of quickly integrating newly developed code with the main body of code that is to be released. Continuous integration saves a lot of time when the team is ready to release the code.

DevOps didn’t come up with this term. Continuous integration is an agile engineering practice originating from the Extreme Programming methodology. The terms been around for a while, but DevOps has adopted this term because automation is required to successfully execute continuous integration. Continuous integration is often the first step down the path toward DevOps maturity.

The continuous integration process from a DevOps perspective involves checking your code in, compiling it into usable (often binary executable) code and running some basic validation testing.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is an extension of continuous integration [DevOps stage 2]. It sits on top of continuous integration. When executing continuous delivery, you add additional automation and testing so that you don’t just merge the code with the main code line frequently, but you get the code nearly ready to deploy with almost no human intervention. It’s the practice of having the code base continuously in a ready-to-deploy state.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment, not to be confused with continuous delivery [DevOps nirvana], is the most advanced evolution of continuous delivery. It’s the practice of deploying all the way into production without any human intervention.

At Oniyosys, our team utilizes continuous delivery don’t deploy untested code; instead, newly created code runs through automated testing before it gets pushed out to production. The code release typically only goes to a small percentage of users and there’s an automated feedback loop that monitors quality and usage before the code is propagated further.