What Does DevOps Really Mean

Perhaps your organization has already adopted the DevOps model. Three questions can help clarify where you stand on the DevOps curve:

Do you, as a developer, have access to troubleshooting information in real time?

Does your production environment use tests and other tools from the development team to validate that the production environment is working?
As a developer, do you view the networking team as your partner?

If the answers are "no," you're not there yet. Here are some things that can be done to improve the situation. Let's start with your tools. While DevOps is more about culture and process than organization, tools can help enforce best practices — specifically, the sharing of troubleshooting information across silos. That requires adding more instrumentation in your software to see how your software is performing in QA and production, not just in development. This is code that traps errors, checks system parameters, reports function timeouts, and returns other values during program execution, which it then writes to log files. You can make use of these DevOps Courses to practice devops in your organization.

In a siloed environment, developers often won't see these log files again once the code is released into production. In a DevOps world, developers have visibility to the files regardless of where the software is run — in development, QA, or in production. Not only do defects get fixed faster, but the same defects are less likely to reappear in future releases — making development, itself, faster and more responsive to the business. That brings agile quality to agile development.