Interest in DevOps and Continuous Delivery and Release Automation (CDRA) are accelerating at a fever pitch. In today’s highly competitive business world, the benefits of DevOps and CD – agility, velocity, and quality – are paramount to success. Businesses are being required to deliver new and innovative solutions faster to drive positive customer experience and to meet business’ constantly evolving requirements.
Technology is increasingly critical to an organization’s ability to win and retain customers. IT needs to be able to meet rapidly changing business expectations.
This is only going to accelerate in 2021, meaning you should prioritize CDRA in 2021.
The benefits of CDRA – and why you should prioritize CDRA in 2021 – fall into two main categories:
- Speed to deliver product and service innovation
- Quality of products and services delivered
Let’s look at both in more detail.
Speed of Delivery
Business and customer expectations are moving faster than ever with no signs of slowing down. The market landscape is shifting rapidly, and businesses need to be able to respond quickly to adapt. With so much of the customer experience riding on technology solutions, frequent releases of new features, applications, and solutions is critical. These quick releases allow companies to keep up both with customer demands and with competitors.
DevOps and CDRA solutions empower organizations to:
- Deliver quickly and more frequently: With continuous delivery, a developer can upload new code to a source code repository for automated testing and move on to the next task immediately, without waiting for manual QA and feedback. The entire cycle is completed more quickly, new applications can be prepared and released much faster, and time to business value improves. A faster time to market and more frequent releases allows for faster response to customer demands and increased product innovation.
- Increase time and resources available for product innovation: CDRA solutions allow for alignment and collaboration among stakeholders. Additionally, by removing many manual tasks they reduce bottlenecks and points of friction in the flow of work. Since your team is no longer executing (or waiting on someone from another team to execute) manual tasks, they can deliver more with less effort. This frees up resources to innovate and/or get to the “someday” projects that have been sitting on the back burner.
- Adapt to market and customer opportunities: When you are delivering smaller updates more frequently, you can quickly shift directions or add functionality based on feedback. Additionally, thanks to the feedback processes inherent in DevOps processes, teams can iterate more rapidly to reach an outcome that will delight customers.
- Achieve great business outcomes: According to a recent DevOps Research & Assessment (DOA) study, high DevOps performers are twice as likely to exceed their organization’s profitability, market share, and productivity goals.
Quality of Delivery
Speed is important, but quality is critical. It doesn’t matter how quickly you release new features or applications if they are riddled with bugs and unusable. Fortunately, speed and quality are not mutually exclusive, and CDRA solutions place a heavy emphasis on both. Automating release processes and removing manual processes certainly makes delivery faster, but it also minimizes the errors that come with manual activities, ensures approvals and quality tests are met, improves auditability, and allows for rapid rollback and recovery when outages do occur.
Most importantly, the overall quality of the product, services, and ultimately the customer experience is improved.
DevOps and CDRA solutions empower organizations to:
- Wow customers with regular improvements: Because CDRA allows for (and pushes for) regular, small changes, teams can continuously improve products and services based on customer feedback.
- Improve CX through reliability: System and application reliability are critical as users become less tolerant of downtime, and as downtime becomes more expensive to companies. CDRA solutions can improve overall reliability by delivering higher quality solutions, reducing downtime, and improving rollback capabilities when issues do occur.
- Provide better service: Bugs and outages happen. It’s a fact of software delivery. With DevOps and CDRA organizations are able to quickly respond to and provide fixes for bugs more rapidly, limiting downtime to customers and reducing disruption. This not only improves customer experience, but it can translate into dollars and business value.
To bolster the importance of exploring investment in this space, major analysts, including Forrester, advise business and technology leaders to evaluate and consider using CDRA platforms and encourage prioritization of CDRA in 2021. In their recent Wave for CDRA, Forrester said, “You can use continuous delivery and release automation (CDRA) to automate digital pipelines, enable faster product iterations, and improve end-to-end management and visibility.”
To read more about the benefits of CDRA, and learn about some of the top vendors in this space check out Forrester’s Wave for Continuous Delivery and Release Automation.
