How does DevOps improve deployment frequency?

DevOps has overtaken every other development methodology. Almost every successful company depends on DevOps to optimize its development and operations.

Simply put, DevOps is a set of processes that allow companies to improve the coordination between teams within the engineering and operations departments. This is important to create and enhance products faster and more agilely with a higher success rate than traditional software development methods such as waterfall methodology.

This article focuses on one of the great benefits of DevOps, which is to improve deployment frequency. We explore how companies can improve product delivery and deployment while automating the process.

What is deployment frequency? 

The deployment frequency is one of the essential data-driven metrics of DevOps and represents the effectiveness of CI/CD. This metric function measures the frequency at which the development teams deploy code to development, test, and production environments. The deployment should include functional pieces of code, improved versions, or bug fixes.

DevOps improves development by making continuous code deliveries in smaller, faster, and more testable modules. This is why the deployment frequency is closely related to the DevOps continuous delivery philosophy. It is an essential metric in the overall software development life-cycle and provides an opportunity to monitor how well the development processes work. This more extensive overview helps identify broader issues like lack of professionalism among the team members and inefficient processes.

What causes low deployment frequency? 

The success of any DevOps project depends on continuously measuring the team’s effectiveness. Your goal should be to improve the deployment frequency for delivering projects faster. Several actions can be taken in the software development environment to increase deployment frequency.

Before DevOps engineers can plan a strategy, they must understand the causes of low deployment frequency. Numerous reasons can bring down the deployment frequency – project size, the number of engineers in the team, and the deadline. However, here are the most common reasons:

• Substantial changes are introduced in the code that requires hundreds of lines of code to be written and tested.
• Fewer people in the team; for instance, if a senior DevOps engineer leaves when the project is still in development. Their absence can delay the project.
• Any organizational structure changes can disturb the workflow.
• Hurdles in the development process such as technological deficiencies, dependencies, etc.
• Unplanned development cycle or bottlenecks in routes to production.

How can the deployment frequency be improved with DevOps?

DevOps implements CI/CD best practices in the team, allowing developers to increase software delivery speed. Continuous integration and delivery are known to automate several development pipelines and reduce the time it takes to include a new feature or update the existing product.

More minor and self-contained changes; as mentioned above, DevOps enables teams to segment the project update or development requirements into smaller tasks. One of the benefits of working with a smaller version of changes is that it makes it much easier to get feedback faster and resolve any issues sooner. This contributes to improving the deployment frequency.

DevOps reduces technical debt. In software engineering, technical debt is described as the implied cost of additional rework that needs to be done because the team chooses an easy (often limited) solution to solve a problem instead of a better approach. With DevOps, any team can significantly reduce technical debt and remove bugs that increase the rate of subsequent deployments.

Test automation with DevOps technology. Manual testing is resource intensive and takes longer, so incorporating automated tests at every stage of the CI/CD pipeline reduces the delivery time multiple folds. It also helps DevOps engineers to catch issues earlier during the development of the code, which further improves deployment frequency.

DevOps uses automated code review tools like GitHub and Review Board that can help improve the code quality and save valuable time. This provides development teams with enough time to regressively review code changes faster.

DevOps uses release trains for more enormous monoliths. Primarily for enterprise-level products, multiple changes are often released together. For such projects, DevOps engineers can batch numerous changes together and release them all simultaneously, thus coordinating the updates without slowing down the deployment frequency.

Conclusion

Deployment frequency is one of the essential metrics to analyze and improve the efficiency of any engineering team. It is valuable data that helps you understand the capabilities of your team and estimate how quickly you can provide value to your customers when required. With DevOps, any organization can promptly improve deployment frequency, as detailed in this guide.

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