By Vikas Basra
DevOps is the driving force behind the tech industry. It paves the way for an endless array of SaaS solutions and digital experiences that service commerce, media, HR, manufacturing and everything in between.
On its own, DevOps already has a market valuation projected to hit $18 billion by 2026. This figure could well rise further as the tech industry prepares to spend a quarter-trillion dollars in 2025 to meet the insatiable demand for AI.
Software development is set to play a leading role here, but driving growth through the adoption of excellent digital products and services needs a fresh approach.
Velocity, the new defining metric
There is a growing issue within DevOps that’s often overlooked. Velocity is the pace at which a company is able to speed through the release cycle to launch new features or products without sacrificing quality.
Top performers such as Netflix and Amazon have mastered an incredible ability to zoom their full release cycles in a matter of days. More specifically, Amazon deploys code every 11.7 seconds using microservices and CI/CD, while Netflix enables daily updates through full-cycle developers.
This is in contrast to traditional enterprises where completing a release cycle takes around three to six months due to rigid hierarchies, manual QA and limited CI/CD automation. These existing structures mean organizations often fail to distinguish high-performing teams from those lagging despite tracking engineering metrics. True performance requires both speed and quality.
If velocity rates aren’t improved, companies risk falling behind the curve rapidly making this a business-critical issue.
Work faster, work smarter
With increasing pressure to deliver products at a faster rate, many organizations assume that putting more hands on deck offers a solution. In reality, throwing more programmers at the problem ends up burning through company resources without making tangible improvements to the velocity metric.
This is because the approach fails to address underlying issues such as bottlenecks in the pipeline or the complexity of modern software architectures.
Likewise, falling for the low-quality code trap to reach a deadline more quickly is like using a Band-Aid to stem a leak. It might help the company release a feature, but won’t solve foundational issues. More importantly, pushing out code with quality issues risks major reputational damage.
To get to the root of the issue once and for all, leaders need to understand what questions to ask in order to uncover sources of waste and set KPIs that offer actual improvements to the speed and quality of development work.
Drive performance with data
Asking the right questions is the first step to improving velocity, but leaders will also need access to detailed data to make meaningful improvements on an ongoing basis.
When organizations leverage tools and technologies with the ability to measure the entire pipeline and pull from productivity management software that teams use, the issues begin to rise to the surface and become transparent.
The data will offer the specific insights needed to effectively improve the speed of release cycles. Data can pinpoint how effectively teams are performing in bug testing or identify the average handover time between teams.
With these insights to hand, the right levers can be pulled. For example, training or automation tools can be applied to areas where teams are struggling to complete quality control checks on time. In other cases, there are avoidable sources of waste.
This approach will deliver an immediate ROI, helping organizations speed through their release cycles and put excellent new products and features in the hands of users.
Vikas Basra is the global head of the intelligent engineering practice at Ness Digital Engineering. He brings a practitioners’ view to drive productivity, velocity and quality in software engineering.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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