DevOps Practices: How to Make Valuable Changes to Your Teams

DevOps has become a buzzword within the software development industry, promising rapid turnaround times for requested changes. As for developers, DevOps promises to increase productivity while reducing the risk of production failures. The book “The Unicorn Project” by Gene Kim describes this process for developers as The Five Ideals.

In this article, we’ll focus on only two of them:

• The Third Ideal — Improvement of daily work
• The Fourth Ideal — Psychological safety

Psychological safety and improvement of daily work make it easier for developers to create changes for their teams, and the work to implement these ideals is not difficult. From automated testing to production monitoring, there are many great things that even junior developers can help bring to their teams that will help their entire team make safer changes to their code.

So, what are these easy changes that can be made? Below is a list of tasks that can be done to improve the projects you are assigned to, with most taking less than four hours to complete.

1. Set up a continuous integration server for your project, such as Jenkins or Team City. This will allow for automated jobs to be run for your code.
2. Create jobs to run testing for pull requests as well as testing jobs to run overnight. This will show the current state of your project’s tests on a nightly basis and will allow for the number of failing tests to be monitored over time.
3. Add a code coverage tool to your automated tests. This will show what is being tested in your code and what is not being tested, creating opportunities to help shore up your teams testing suite as well as confirm that your changes will be covered by existing tests.
4. Create an automated deployment job on your CI server. This will convert the manual deployment process in a one click job, allowing the code to be deployed on command.
5. Modify your project to extract metrics of the project, allowing your code to easily be monitored for faults in production.

The tasks highlighted above will quickly add value to your team while helping protect you for making dangerous changes to your team’s code base. I recently changed teams and have moved to a new web project. The project runs fine on my local, but it is hard to track what is affected by my changes. The team already has a CI server to build their code, but there is no point in setting up any testing jobs as the project has fewer tests than I have fingers.

Instead, I created a monitoring tool that captures all requests to the website and records their results. With the tooling in place, my team can now see how long it takes for each part of the website to load, as well as how many errors are being produced. Now, when I make any changes, I can check these metrics to see if my change is causing issues to the site, increasing my confidence in my code.

If you are interested in learning more about DevOps and how to take advantage of it, here are a few good reading resources to look into:

• “The Unicorn Project,” by Gene Kim.
• “The Phoenix Project,” by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford.
• “The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations,” by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, Jez Humble and John Willis.