How DevOps Could Change Your Business

Henry Ford turned the U.S. auto industry on its head when he introduced the idea of prefabricating components at remote sites, and then putting them together on a production line. Despite many industries following suit, software lagged behind until 2008, when Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois told the Agile Conference there was a better way to develop code:
– Write the Code
– Test the Code
– Use the Code
– Evaluate, Schedule for Next Review

The term ?DevOps? is short for Development and Operations. It first appeared in Belgium, where developers refined Shafer and Depois? ideas. Since then, DevOps became a counter movement against the belief that software development is a linear process and has largely overwhelmed it.

DevOps – A Better Way

DevOps emerged at an exciting time in the IT industry, with new technology benefiting from a faster internet. However, the 2008 world recession was also beginning to bite. Developers scampered to lower their human resource costs and get to market sooner.

The DevOps method enabled them to colloborate across organizational boundaries and work together to write, quality assure and performance test each piece of code produced in parallel.
DevOps? greater time-efficiency got them to market sooner and helped them steal a march on the competition.

There are many advantages to DevOps when we work in this collaborative way. Cooperation improves relationships between developers, quality assurers and end users. This helps ensure a better understanding of the other drivers and a more time-effective product.

Summary of DevOps Objectives

DevOps spans the entire delivery pipeline, and increases the frequency with which progress is reviewed, and updates are deployed. The benefits of this include:

? Faster time to market and implementation

? Lower failure rate of new releases

? Shortened lead time for bug fixes and updates

The Psycho-Social Implications of DevOps

DevOps drills through organization borders and traditional work roles. Participants must welcome change and take on board new skills. Its interdepartmental approach requires closer collaboration across structural boundaries and greater focus on overarching business goals.

Outsourcing the detail to freelancers on the Internet adds a further layer of opportunity. Cultures and time zones vary, requiring advanced project management skills. Although cloud-based project management software provides adequate tools, it needs an astute mind to build teams that are never going to meet.

The DevOps movement is thus primarily a culture changer, where parties to a project accept the good intentions of their collaborators, while perhaps tactfully proposing alternatives. There is more to accepting a culture than using a new tool. We have to blend different ways of thinking together. We conclude by discussing three different methods to achieve this.

Three Ways to Deploy DevOps in your?Organisation

If you foresee regular DevOps-based projects, consider running your entire organisation through an awareness program to redirect thinking. This will help non-participants understand why DevOps members may be ?off limits? when they are occupied with project work. Outsourcing tasks to contracting freelancers can mitigate this effect.

There are three implementation models associated with DevOps although these are not mutually exclusive.

? Use systems thinking. Adopt DevOps as company culture and apply it to every change regardless of whether the process is digital, or not

? Drive the process via increased understanding and feedback from key receivers. Allow this to auto-generate participative DevOps projects

? Adopt a continuous improvement culture. DevOps is not only for mega upgrades. Feedback between role players is paramount for success everywhere we go.

You can use the DevOps concept everywhere you go and whenever you need a bridge to better understanding of new ideas. We diminish DevOps when we restrict its usefulness to the vital role it plays in software development. The philosophy behind it belongs in every business.

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Still Looking For A Way To Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?

We use Excel spreadsheets everyday. We use them to prepare budgets and reports. We even use them when drafting plans and forecasts. With this ubiquitous office application, entering data and carrying out on-the-spot computations and analysis is quick and easy. However, when it’s time to consolidate Excel data, I won’t be surprised if you wished there was an easy way.

In fact, you were probably looking for a solution before landing on this page, right?

Because budgeting, reporting, planning, and forecasting are normally done by a group of people and not just by one individual, spreadsheets bearing the necessary data can be scattered in different folders, desktops, offices, and, in the case of really large organisations, geographical locations.

How are these data brought together? Through email attachments or by sharing folders in a local area network. Each member of the working team sends out copies of their own spreadsheets to other members, who then review them, make necessary changes, then send back to the source. The files can go back and forth until everyone is satisfied.

With each sending, sharing, and edit, business critical data gets exposed to all sorts of spreadsheet risks. Copy-paste errors, omission of a negative sign, erroneous inputs, accidental deletions, and even fraudulent manipulations can take place. And because each member can end up with multiple versions of a single spreadsheet, the chance of working on the wrong version exists.

So when all the data gets consolidated and finalised, it is possible for the end product to contain significant errors. It may not happen all the time, but it certainly can happen.

But that’s not the only disadvantage of spreadsheets. The entire process of comparing cells and sheets, copy-pasting data, linking cells, writing formulas, and specifying ranges can be very tedious, not to mention time-consuming. With spreadsheets, beating deadlines is always an almost impossible exercise.

What you need is a solution that will no longer require you to consolidate Excel spreadsheets. One that is faster, more reliable, and significantly less error-prone. Denizon has a server-based solution that has all those capabilities and much more.

With a server-based solution, all your data is stored in one place. Everyone is working on the same data source, so consolidation is fast and easy. Everyone becomes synchronised and no one has to worry about working on the wrong version.

Read more about our server-based solution

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Spreadsheet Reporting – No Room in your company in an age of Business Intelligence

Still looking for a Way to Consolidate Excel Spreadsheets?

Disadvantages of Spreadsheets

Spreadsheet woes – ill equipped for an Agile Business Environment

Spreadsheet Fraud

Spreadsheet Woes – Limited features for easy adoption of a control framework

Spreadsheet woes – Burden in SOX Compliance and other Regulations

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Why Spreadsheets can send the pillars of Solvency II crashing down

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

2015 – What’s ahead for UK Business?

According to reports just in, the global environment industry is down. Less money is available for what some CEO?s still see as grudge expenditure, and many U.S. agencies are seeking soft budget cuts. The UK is proving to be an exception following the announcement of ESOS, and EcoVaro does not expect the May elections will have much impact in this regard.

ESOS calls for mandatory energy assessments in companies above a certain size, and requires specific proposals to cut consumption. There is no indication of compulsory follow-through, although it is clear the Environment Agency hopes rising electricity prices and the prospect of monetary savings will do the trick.

It is an open question whether the Tory government would have interfered with commerce to this extent, were it not for the European directive that enforced it. The overall goal is to cut EU energy consumption across the board by 20% by 2020. Energy consultants are rubbing their hands in glee. EcoVaro?s response is to provide cloud-based software.

We will be interested to see how many UK companies make the first deadline of 5 December 2015, in the light of reports that half the 9,000 firms affected appear not to even know that ESOS exists. Some will no doubt pay last-minute lip service. Those with an eye on their own sustainability will grasp the Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme with both hands.

The initial ESOS deadline was always going to be a challenge. Some big corporates have stolen a march albeit egged on by green stakeholders. The next challenge comes in June 2015 with the implementation of the European Union?s ?Waste Catalogue? of hazardous substances, and rules for their disposal. We hope a new ISO 14001 will arrive soon and pull the loose threads together.

The introduction of carbon trading late this year brings further opportunities to increase profits through wise stewardship. Auditable metrics are essential for this.

EcoVaro can assist by processing your raw data. We provide this service on a virtual cloud. In return, you can get advice on optimising the quality of your graphs for presentations.

How DevOps oils the Value Chain

DevOps ? a clipped compound of development and operations – is a way of working whereby software developers are in a team with project beneficiaries. A client centred approach extends the project plan to include the life cycle of the product or service, for which the software is developed.

We can then no longer speak of a software project for say Joe?s Accounting App. The software has no intrinsic value of its own. It follows that the software engineers are building an accounting app product. This is a small, crucially important distinction, because they are no longer in a silo with different business interests.

To take the analogy further, the developers are no longer contractors possibly trying to stretch out the process. They are members of Joe?s accounting company, and they are just as keen to get to market fast as Joe is to start earning income. DevOps uses this synergy to achieve the overarching business goal.

A Brief Introduction to OpsDev

You can skip this section if you already read this article. If not then you need to know that DevOps is a culture, not a working method. The three ?members? are the software developers, the beneficiaries, and a quality control mechanism. The developers break their task into smaller chunks instead of releasing the code to quality control as a single batch. As a result, the review process happens contiguously along these simplified lines.

Code	QC	Test	?	?	?
?	Code	QC	Test	?	?
?	?	Code	QC	Test	?
?	?	?	Code	QC	Test

Colour Key

Developers

Quality Control

Beneficiary

This is a marked improvement over the previously cumbersome method below.

Write the Code	?	Test the Code	?	Use the Code
?	Evaluate, Schedule for Next Review			?

Working quickly and releasing smaller amounts of code means the OpsDev team learns quickly from mistakes, and should come to product release ahead of any competitor using the older, more linear method. The shared method of working releases huge resources in terms of user experience and in-line QC practices. Instead of being in a silo working on its own, development finds it has a richer brief and more support from being ?on the same side of the organisation?.

The Key Role that Application Program Interfaces Play

Application Program Interfaces, or API?s for short, are building blocks for software applications. Using proprietary software-bridges speeds this process up. A good example would be the PayPal applications that we find on so many websites today. API?s are not just for commercial sites, and they can reduce costs and improve efficiency considerably.

The following diagram courtesy of TIBCO illustrates how second-party applications integrate with PayPal architecture via an API fa?ade.

The DevOps Revolution Continues ?

We close with some important insights from an interview with Jim Stoneham. He was general manager of the Yahoo Communities business unit, at the time Flickr became a part. ?Flickr was a codebase,? Jim recalls, ?that evolved to operate at high scale over 7 years – and continuing to scale while adding and refining features was no small challenge. During this transition, it was a huge advantage that there was such an integrated dev and ops team?

The ?maturity model? as engineers refer to DevOps status currently, enables developers to learn faster, and deploy upgrades ahead of their competitors. This means the client reaches and exceeds break-even sooner. DevOps lubricates the value chain so companies add value to a product faster. One reason it worked so well with Flickr, was the immense trust between Dev and Ops, and that is a lesson we should learn.

?We transformed from a team of employees to a team of owners. When you move at that speed, and are looking at the numbers and the results daily, your investment level radically changes. This just can’t happen in teams that release quarterly, and it’s difficult even with monthly cycles.? (Jim Stoneham)

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