How to Apply DevOps In Your Product Development? - Step-by-Step Guide
Nowadays, building a better product is not enough to beat the competition.
Due to the continuous evolution that is happening in the IT industry, it is of utmost importance for businesses to adapt to new trends and meet the demands of time-to-market features.
DevOps is one such methodology that can help your business with that. DevOps has caused massive disruption in the IT field.
DevOps can basically enable any business to build quality software products faster with strong team cohesion.
However, DevOps goes beyond from being just a methodology. – It is a culture that unifies product development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to speed up processes, while not jeopardizing the product quality.
Now, if you’re just starting out with DevOps, it’s important to first understand the main goals of DevOps before applying it in your own product development.
The Main Goals of DevOps
The main goals of DevOps are, like we already mentioned, to boost product development lifecycle by building processes for automation, continuous monitoring, testing, and improvement.
But, besides these, DevOps goals also include:
- Successful product releases
- Better product quality
- Shortened time to fix bugs
- Faster time to recovery if the product crashes
In fact, according to State of DevOps report 2016, businesses that adopt DevOps in their product development deploy 30 times more frequently, have 60 times fewer failures and recover 60 times faster.
In simple terms, DevOps makes your product development process faster while raising the product quality.
Here’s how you can apply DevOps in your product development.
How to Apply DevOps in Your Product Development?
In the development of most products, software, or web applications, developers often face a number of challenges, some of them are expected but the majority of them are unexpected.
These challenges can ultimately slow down your product development lifecycle. But, if you implement the following steps thoroughly, then you can easily adopt DevOps and speed up the development process.
1 – Define a Product Development Strategy
Having a strategy is the first crucial step towards adopting DevOps. And the strategy can only be defined if you know the main purpose behind building your product.
So before jumping onto the development, create a well-defined plan for your product. Specifically, there are three main factors you must consider if you wish to create a well-defined product plan.
Identify the Market:
Once you have an idea for a product, it is of utmost importance to do the research and confirm whether the users will use your product or not.
For this, you can begin with doing surveys on social media or community forums where the majority of your target audience hang-out.
While conducting the survey, make sure to include the following things to understand the requirements of your target audience.
- What are the requirements of your audience: Try to get to know people who are going to use your product. This will help you understand their requirements at a deeper level, which will ultimately help you develop the product around those requirements.
- What are the benefits of using your product: For any product to be successful, it is imperative that it solves a real problem of users. For instance, if you’re building a food delivery app, users would love to see where do you store your ingredients and their health benefits.
- What are the core features of your product: As you will discover the problem and interests of your target audience through research, it will be easy for you to identify the core features that people will want to use. Once you have that list of core features, you can build the first version of your product around those features.
Overall, doing deep research will tell you whether your product will make it big or become obsolete.
Fix a Time Frame:
Fixing a time frame to launch your product is crucial. It helps to allocate tasks to all team members. However, your timely release will depend on the skills and experience of your development team.
Therefore, it’s best to choose an Agile software development company you can rely on. The right development partner will help you decide the correct release data based on the features of your product and users requirement.
Remember, team coordination and efficiency plays a huge role in the success of any product.
2 – Document Everything!
The documentation basically helps in describing the functionality and the architecture of a project which is under development process. It helps everyone involved in the project – designers, developers, testers, end-users, and marketers.
But the main benefit of documentation is that it helps to improve the quality of a product by tracking the progress of the project.
Therefore, ensure to prepare all the documentation like Design document, Technical document, User document, and Marketing document right from the beginning.
These documents, if written in a clear and concise manner, will make it easier for everyone involved the project to skip the training and directly jump right into any stage of development.
3 – Go Agile
If this is the first you’re hearing the term ‘Agile’, then you should know that Agile is a methodology which breaks a project into several iterations of equal duration (usually between 2 – 8 weeks).
The best part about Agile methodology is that it allows businesses to see the progress of each and every product development stage so that can make necessary changes throughout the development cycle.
For instance, if the time-to-market is the main concern for your product, Agile allows you to quickly build a basic version of your product using the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach.
4 – Set Automated Testing
In order to launch your product on time, it is equally important to conduct testing at regular intervals.
Simply put, each time the development team adds or modifies the source code, testing should be done immediately after to ensure that the product works well on all targeted platforms.
This parallel testing strategy allows executing multiple tests on several platforms at once through test automation suites.
Test automation suites basically help in discovering useful insights into each development stage by analyzing the source code thoroughly and ensure that the product is performing as expected.
This exercise ultimately impacts the quality of the product through a wide range of testing methods including Unit testing, Functional testing, Integration testing, Regression testing, and Data-Driven testing.
5 – Choose Right Technologies
Things were simpler a decade ago. There were fewer technologies. Today, there is a huge variety of them. And all of them have their own benefits and drawbacks.
That means, if you choose the wrong technology stack, then you will end up facing a lot of roadblocks and challenges, which will ultimately slow down the progress.
Therefore, you should be realistic while choosing technologies. The wrong choice may end in financial losses and delay. So, if you’re not experienced, leave the selection process to the professionals.
A team of professional developers can easily identify the right technology stack based on the type of your project and can build a top-notch product covering all the functionalities that you need.
Conclusion
Reducing time-to-market a product has become a necessity nowadays. Therefore, most businesses strive to bring their product as quickly as possible to market so that they don’t miss any opportunity and can easily improvise according to market demands.
So, if you wish to achieve the same objectives, you must rely on DevOps as a Service to realize all your product goals.
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