Step 2 to building a DevOps Platform: Enable high throughput

Enable short and predictable release cycles

One of the most important cornerstones of DevOps is that the agility of the development team should extend all the way to quality assurance, operations, and production. In practice it mean that you should aim to have predictable and short release cycles.

Short release cycles means releasing small changes often during the project and ensuring that a fully-working digital product comes out of the other end of the pipeline.  

Get feedback within minutes

To enable high throughput, you need to have short feedback cycles. Developers should get the quality feedback in minutes instead of hours or even days.

As discussed in the first part of this blog series, all changes should be documented in the platform. When you make changes in the system, commit them in the version control and have automated testing system in place, which means you will receive feedback within minutes! Thanks to that, you’ll know right away if the changes were successful from the testing perspective.

Less manual work, more automated testing

All your team’s repetitive tasks should be automated. When the amount of manual work and hands-on time in testing is decreased, your team will have a better throughput as a result.

When you start increasing the automated testing against manual testing, it’s important to set a smart target. The first realistic target would be to decrease time and resources spent in manual acceptance testing by 50%. Already by doing this, you’ll be closer to your teams highest possible throughput.

Fast environment creation

Your team needs to enable on-demand test and development environments. You can efficiently use cloud infrastructure when you spin up a test environment when you need it, and tear it down when it’s not needed anymore. This can be done with public cloud services like AWS, Azure, etc. There’s no more need to spend days for setting up a server environment.

Automation enables high throughput

To enable your team’s high throughput, you need to have automation in place. By automating the software pipeline, you’ll be able to save both time and resources and improve the throughput. Because automating makes it possible to find bugs earlier in the pipeline, it will enhance the quality of the digital product coming out of the pipeline.

From the tooling perspective, needed functionalities are:

• Version control system
• Automated testing tools
• Automated deployment tools
• Continuous integration tooling
• Infrastructure environments

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