The Three As of Supporting Your Development Team
Three key strategies to support your development team.
DevOps teams are under greater pressure than ever to deploy code continuously, without interruption or disruption. Deploying to the cloud at scale — safely and reliably — is an ever-present challenge for many developers. And expectations are only increasing. Armory’s CEO and president, Jim Douglas, suggests how developers and DevOps teams can become every company’s heroes with the help of abstraction, automation and attention.
One in five organizations suffered a severe cloud outage within the last three years, costing $300,000 to $5 million an hour, depending on company size. That amount doesn’t account for reputational damage. PwC reports nearly one-third of U.S. consumers won’t give brands a second chance after a bad experience. Customers have little tolerance for missteps.
These statistics demonstrate the value of building world-class development teams that employ industry best practices. As of 2020, more than half of software engineers worldwide worked outside the technology industry. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in — retail, healthcare, telecommunications, aerospace, manufacturing — software has become a strategic lever for success, and your developers are explicitly tied to your ability to capture value (i.e., drive revenue).
According to McKinsey, companies with higher deployment velocity can achieve 20% higher operating returns than those with slower cycles. Airship found more than 90% of developers and marketers say waiting to deliver improvements significantly impacts their business — but releasing frequent updates is not enough. The 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report revealed that new software must be reliable to drive business value.
Developers face increasing pressure to accelerate development while maintaining or improving software quality and reliability and satisfying growing customer expectations. How can your organization support its software development teams as they strive to deliver greater product value while decreasing downtime? Abstraction, automation and attention.
1. Abstraction
Most businesses are committed to developing all new apps as cloud-native, seeking the potential advantages that come with current design best practices. However, until your organization has the necessary knowledge, experience, process flows and automation in place, achieving DORA metrics commensurate with elite teams isn’t in the cards. One way to accelerate the journey is to remove complex yet mundane lower-level tasks that consume unnecessary time and potentially introduce costly mistakes.
More companies are adopting low-code and no-code platforms to abstract complexity, which leads to more productivity and better product outcomes when shifting resources to cloud-native projects or onboarding new developers with less experience onto cloud-native teams. Programmers no longer need in-depth knowledge of coding languages, development environments and deployment processes to successfully release high-quality code. Low-code/no-code solutions provide extensible and customizable environments without exposing complexity to developers.
Adopting these platforms eliminates essential complex but lower-level tasks. Doing away with manual input enables teams to significantly reduce human error and allows developers to spend more time on what they do best — designing applications that drive revenue and customer satisfaction.
2. Automation
In addition to leveraging abstraction to lower complexity and drive productivity gains, automating complex workflows will further increase velocity and result in higher reliability by removing the middleman wherever possible. For example, deployment is an essential but complex part of the development lifecycle. Having developers or DevOps teams create and babysit the operation step-by-step is unproductive and very error-prone. Adopting automated continuous deployment creates significant and immediate quantifiable value.
The right continuous deployment solution can automatically send verified committed code to all your target environments — dev, staging, production — regardless of your scale. Additionally, using automated progressive rollouts wherever applicable enables teams to manage an update’s “blast radius” by controlling the number of users exposed to new production code. Releasing to iterative audiences impacts fewer users with software issues.
Continuous deployment leveraging progressive rollouts runs constant tests to determine software health based on designated metrics. Once the code passes muster, a larger group receives it. The process repeats until the update reaches everyone. If the continuous deployment system uncovers a problem, it automatically rolls back the software to a previously designated version, limiting or even preventing application downtime.
Developers just want deployments to work — they don’t care about how it happens. Progressive rollouts require complex processes but are essential to minimize downtime. With continuous deployment, teams simply push a button to make the magic happen. The process improves the reliability, predictability and repeatability of update releases. Eliminating developer involvement also removes the risk of human error. And instead of troubleshooting deployment issues, developers can rapidly respond to feedback and create a superior product for the next release while maintaining customer service quality.
See More: Technical Debt: How to Tame the Sleeping Giant in Your DevOps Team
3. Attention
As a company or team leader, you must pay attention to your developers. The current environment exerts many pressures on the team, including increased workload generated by trying to modernize legacy apps, migration to new cloud services and suppliers, intensified customer demand for quick fixes and feature updates, and pressure to maintain software reliability and service stability.
Without the proper tools, your developers can experience stress, frustration and burnout. Those feelings can decrease team productivity and efficiency, impacting the final product and the company’s competitive advantage. Additionally, high turnover due to job stress can stifle performance and innovation.
Addressing stress and burnout requires communication and metric monitoring. Hiccups in the software creation process are not a people problem — they are a workflow problem. Assigning more work to increase productivity is counterproductive.
Instead, managers should develop and apply the right performance metrics to identify the root causes and solutions to productivity issues. The most common measurements used by high-performance teams developing cloud-native applications are the four DORA metrics:
- Deployment frequency.
- Lead time for changes.
- Change failure rate.
- Mean time to recovery.
Once you identify current benchmarks, you can strategize tactics to improve performance. These numbers also help development teams build an economic case for technology investment. Since reliable deployments are tied directly to revenue generation and customer satisfaction, CFOs can easily calculate the cost of downtime compared to the upfront technology investment.
Technology not only improves performance but also reduces workload and stress on the development team, leading to more satisfied employees and less turnover and contributing to workplace cohesion and innovation. But identifying this need requires you to pay attention to your team.
Succeeding with the Three As
As the economic uncertainty drags on, companies will lean into “software as a strategy.” Rising physical goods and labor costs and increasingly tight budgets will force companies to get serious about leveraging digitalization to drive improved workflow and capital efficiency. Software streamlines high-value work and eliminates the need for excess resources, providing a new cost optimization option to accelerate the top line.
Software development teams play a crucial role in company revenue and competitive advantages. The three As — abstraction, automation and attention — can provide the work environment they and you need to succeed in the marketplace.
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MORE ON DEVOPS:
- How to Use Progressive Deployment to Address Dev Team Burnout
- Uncovering the Myths About Low-Code Platforms
- APIs to Ease the Way: Charting A New Course in Cross-System Navigation
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