8 Ways in which a DevOps Approach Helps you Build Faster

Introduction

A company faces a challenge during the product development and delivery phases of attempting to achieve faster product development without compromising the quality of the product. Along with faster product development, the process should be inexpensive and less time-consuming, which will ensure faster testing and delivery.

The DevOps approach can help a company to integrate their testing and product development processes and help software development and IT teams automate the process by building, testing, and releasing their product faster and more reliably. The quality assurance team helps in testing but using traditional procedures can always take up time and still miss the errors. This is where automating the process can help a company in the long run.

Companies should create strategies to develop expertise and ensure long-term commitment, by which they can market their products faster without compromising the product quality. Faster product development will help companies reduce Time to Market, or TTM for their products which will give them better sales, profits, leadership position, and flexibility.

How Can You Speed Up Product Development?

A company should always keep faster product development as one of its top priorities to keep customer satisfaction and retention high. Over the course of product development, expected and unexpected issues may crop up. This is where a good DevOps team can help overcome the hurdles to ensure faster product development.

Here are 8 ways by which the DevOps approach can help build products faster:

Ensure a well-rounded Product Development Strategy

Before kickstarting the product development process, a company must create a well-planned roadmap that can act as a blueprint in the long run. The product development strategy must have detailed steps like – Identifying the Market, fixing a Time Frame, and determine the key approaches which will help to overcome issues during product planning and launch.

Create or hire a good DevOps team

Choosing the right DevOps team for product development should be a priority. DevOps team can help automate processes right from the product planning phase to the product delivery phase. This will ensure a higher quality product and less time to market, thus, outsourcing a dedicated DevOps team that has the right mix of skill and expertise will help the company in faster product development.

This is where companies like [x]cube LABS that have dedicated DevOps teams can help a business grow and develop their product faster and can deliver services that are best suited to a company’s objectives and interests.

Defining testing strategy at an earlier stage

The product development team must create testing strategies that are both time-saving and effective. The DevOps team should choose tests that automate processes and help in conducting parallel tests, including regression testing and performance testing. Since highly skilled developers are required, in-house teams can be expensive. Thus, outsourcing to a DevOps team can reduce the time to market and come up with innovative products, and control costs effectively.

Using Agile Methodology

Agile methodology can create a time frame that is best suited for the company for product development and launch by breaking down the project into several iterations of equal duration, spread across a time period of 2-8 weeks depending upon the product requirement. Agile methodology can help create a minimum viable product with user-friendly features, and release it in the market quicker and get customer feedback faster.

Periodic Automated Testing

It is very important to conduct software tests regularly. New source codes are added or modified by software developers frequently, thus, testing has to be done so that the product works well on all the supporting platforms. Test Automation suites give you better insight into each product by analyzing the code’s memory contents, data tables, the contents of the file, and internal programs to check product performance and give an in-depth perspective into the code functionality, and help release a perfect product.

Right Software Development Technologies

Since there are a plethora of software development technologies available in the market which have their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Not selecting the right technology stack may cause roadblocks during product development. During a test software framework, Application Development Environment (ADE) can play an important role in the test systems. Thus, it is imperative to choose an ADE with multiple platforms and integrate it with measurement and control services.

Documentation of all the product development strategies

Documentation acts as a blueprint during product development as it describes the architecture and functionality of a product that is under development. Documentation helps to improve the quality of software, makes the code review process faster, makes it easier for new developers, and can make the product development phase both time- and cost-effective for companies. Well-documented error codes and FAQs guide developers to troubleshoot production issues as well.

Removing Unused Code

In large projects, the documentation could get into the hands of new developers. Any changes made to a code, even to a dormant code can inadvertently introduce bugs. Maintaining any codebase is a burden as developers have to go through all of it and having unused code can only create more confusion. Code clean-up or cleansing can speed up the development process and improve the quality of software.