6 Ways To Empower Developers and Increase Productivity. The goal of DevOps is to increase productivity. Subscribe to get the latest updates on container-native & DevOps news here.

25 Jan 2023 - Aditi Mishra

6 Ways To Empower Developers and Increase ProductivityThe goal of DevOps is to increase productivity

54% of engineers say they have too many manual steps within their deployment process, according to an Armory survey. A big goal of DevOps is to increase productivity, yet a lot of organizations still struggle with the efficiency of their software release processes. With the pervasiveness of multi-cloud, developers now face an escalating number of deployment environments.

"Developers aren't machines; they're people, and people deserve to have a quality of life when they're doing their jobs", Anna Daugherty, senior product marketing manager at Armory.

Identify Where Your Manual Checks Are

The first step to speeding up CI/CD is identifying where manual steps exist within the development workflow. The DevOps life cycle, often visually depicted as an infinity loop, includes many states, such as design, build, test, deploy and assess and monitor. If each step has one or more manual steps, you accrue a lot of manual debt, says Daugherty.

Shift From Continuous Delivery to Deployment

Depending on whom you ask, the ‘CD’ may stand for continuous delivery or continuous deployment. Daughtery encourages teams to embrace the latter whenever possible as it reduces friction in the software release process.

Increase Confidence With Testing

Consider canary testing, which rolls out changes only to a small subset of users, or blue-green deployment, which can deploy to different places at different times.

Chose the right toolsets

You can have all the tools in the world, but if they don’t fit together, that can drag down the process. So, how do we implement more automation into the DevOps cycle? And what sort of tools should we look for? According to Daugherty, when scouting for DevOps tools, technology leaders should prioritize open solutions that aren’t closed-off environments. Instead, they should offer flexibility and the ability to integrate with the tools you already use every day.

Consider Open Source Software (OSS)

Open source software can empower developers and bridge gaps in the CI/CD process, says Argo co-founder Michael Daugherty.

Other projects from the Cloud-Native Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Continuous Delivery Foundation are mature with proven stable adoptions.

Become Developer-First

To become a developer-first organization, developers will need more say in the processes. This will involve balancing top-down requirements with total developer control. Netflix extolls full-cycle development, in which a developer oversees the building and operational aspects of a single component throughout its entire life cycle.

The key to increasing deployment fluidity is by knocking off manual bottlenecks with more automation

We’ve highlighted some potential strategies to increase developer productivity. Daughtery hopes that similar roles such as DevOps, site reliability engineering, and platform engineering join forces in the future.