7 Principles for DevOps Success

Success today in the App based economy, business success depends on DevOps. Business leaders must understand what it dates to build a mature, effective Continuous Development (CD) practice.

Here are 7 key principles business leaders must embrace and practice.

1. Production readiness 
The fundamental principle behind CD is the ability to deliver a production-ready release on demand. The organization must reach a maturity level in which the application code is always in a production ready state. Production readiness does not necessarily mean that the application is deployed to production on a continuous basis, but rather the organization retains the ability to do so at will.

2. Uncompromised quality
Software quality cannot be compromised at any point and the development organization has to prioritize high quality over new features. Ensuring a consistent high quality requires
developer's responsibility and proper tooling. It demands tiers of comprehensive testing: Unit testing and static analysis before build and automated functional testing, load, and endurance  testing with proper runtime diagnostics tools in place. Quality failures abort the build process until resolution.

3. Repeatable delivery
The entire software delivery process from build through staging to production must be reliably repeatable so that each iteration is performed in an identical manner. This is achieved by adopting IT tasks automation. Repeated manual tasks that are prone to errors and inconsistencies are also wasting expensive IT resources and time. Automation of these tasks is a prerequisite to any successful CD process.

4. Frequent build and integration
A CD environment operates with the notion that changes to the application code between build cycles are minimal. Agile, incremental development is practiced alongside CD to ensure that
the development project is broken into short iterations. Builds are triggered on all code checked-in to ensure that problems are isolated and addressed quickly.

5. Application stack consistency
The application stacks should be consistent and automatically provisioned to eliminate environment configuration inconsistencies. Consistency also accelerates the developer's and IT problem resolution capability as it reduces the failures related to application external dependencies.

6. Diagnostics and application management
High code quality requires problem detection and immediate resolution as defects occur. Fast and meaningful diagnostics data becomes critical to a successful CD implementation. Static analysis and dynamic analysis tools are sequentially deployed during the build cycle providing developers with the insight and drill down data. Lack of developer insight and diagnostics information allows defects to slip through and delay the ability to deliver a quality build.

7. Broad test automation coverage
Test automation is a prerequisite to ensure high quality and production readiness. Unit tests and multiple layers of automated functional tests are implemented to identify potential issues and regressions. Developers are required to develop unit tests for each submitted piece of code. Automated code quality and unit testing during the integration phase should cover at minimum 90 percent of the code.