The software industry has gone through a process of improving the efficiency by moving to new processes like Agile, better operations due to cloud, new service delivery model through SaaS but the competition in the market has gone up due to digitalization, socialization, PaaS, IaaS and hence companies are finding it difficult to adapt to the agility in which customer feedback needs to be released and for this, innovation needs to be at its best.

Digital experience in changing the consumer experience: for example an automotive industry is looking at delivering on demand service like locking and unlocking a car using apps remotely and hence we need an improved service model to support on demand services like these. Also with cloud technologies every user is treated as a customer and supporting millions of user base requires an improvement in the way the software is delivered.  Let’s look at some of the challenges and gaps faced at various levels due to the digital world experience and the right solution to address them.

Developers:  The greatest challenge faced by the developers is the turnaround time within which he has to deliver the tickets allocated to him. Because of this, the developer is forced to test in the development environment, which is not the same as production. This results in ignoring the code change impact on the infrastructure and deployment.

Operations:  The primary goal of people who handle operations is uptime, turnaround time on feature deployment and number of builds, releases per day etc. but they are very concerned on the impact due to code changes on these areas. This may impact their primary goals.

Cloud Impact:  Earlier cloud was more focused on transferring CapEx to OpEX by shifting the focus of the IT department on business value adds against provisioning hardware, upgrading Operating systems etc. As years passed companies realized that the real value add from cloud is to reduce waste due to change management processes and other manual processes which still creates waste and hinders the ability to deliver during continuous change  and continuous improvements.

Product Management: Product managers are finding it difficult due to the change management procedure limitations. The operations team not having the development skills and hence a long cycle to release customer feedback quickly is becoming a huge challenge.

Agile development:  Agile development is all about being receptive to change rather than resistant to change, this agility to change cannot be in silos of the project lifecycle but it should be from the start of development, deployment, release of the code to production.

SaaS: SaaS has transformed many products to a service based model and hence the success of these companies depends on the effectiveness of operations, availability, scalability, quality of release on time. As we know, in the digital world the consumers judge the service quality from these companies by digital interaction over the internet.

Some of the practices we can look at implementing to  help achieve the goals of  a developer, IT resource and Product Manager, bring in more agility and innovation by using the power of cloud agile etc are:

• Active Stakeholder Participation
• Automated Testing
• Integrated and automated Configuration Management
• Integrated Change Management
• Continuous Integration
• Build Automation
• Integrated Deployment Planning
• Deployment Automation
• Production Support
• Application Monitoring
• Automated Dashboards

These are the practices from both development and operations on a cloud environment for developing quality SaaS products. The model to integrate the operations and the development team for better collaboration is what has been defined as a DevOps model.  We can now say, DevOps is a software delivery model for bringing in more agility and by applying innovation using DevOps, Cloud and agile quality service can be delivered to customer.