There’s a lot of excitement around DevOps, but some common challenges keep organizations from speeding up their DevOps pipeline. Here are five of the most common bottlenecks.
Table of Contents
Poor architecture
The most important part of an agile DevOps pipeline is architecture. A solid architectural foundation allows for faster releases, more reliable products, and a better overall user experience. If you’re not sure what good architecture looks like or how it impacts your business, here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Can we quickly deploy new features?
- How long does it take us to roll out changes?
- Are there bugs in the system that need to be fixed immediately before they get released into production?
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, your architecture might slow down your DevOps pipeline. This can cause multiple problems:
- Poorly designed code is difficult for new developers on the team to understand and work with; this means that even if someone else wants to make changes, they won’t be able to do so quickly or easily without assistance from another person who understands how everything works together (which could mean waiting days/weeks/months).
- Bugs in production mean unhappy customers—and unhappy customers don’t buy products! So not only does poor architecture slow down product development time but also hurts sales by causing problems during customer interaction periods, leading directly back into slower sales cycles overall.
That said, it’s vital to utilize the necessary DevOps tools from providers like JFrog, which are effective at accelerating your software supply chain.
Ineffective collaboration
Without effective collaboration, there is no innovation. Collaboration is the cornerstone of DevOps, as it allows for continuous communication between teams and individuals to ensure everyone stays on the same page.
You need an effective collaboration system to get the most out of each stage of your DevOps workflow. Here’s how:
- Work with other teams effectively. Work with other departments or teams daily, and make sure everyone understands each other’s’ roles and goals. If you’re having trouble collaborating with another team member or department, try scheduling regular meetings where you can talk through any issues that have come up recently—and make sure everyone has access to relevant information so they can help resolve them quickly if necessary. You should also create a shared vision of what makes your company successful, so everyone knows what they’re working toward together (and why).
- Collaborate effectively with customers when building products for them that meet their needs rather than just creating something new without their input first; this will help keep costs down while helping ensure quality control over what gets made next time around since there won’t be as much guesswork involved later down the line when making changes (or fixing bugs).
Process-heavy review and approval steps
Review and approval steps can be a bottleneck in your DevOps pipeline. For example, if you’re using a manual process to review and approve code changes, it could take hours or even days to complete all the necessary steps.
In some environments, there is much more than one person involved in ensuring that code is ready to be integrated into production. Each step adds more time before code can be deployed into production, which can slow down your DevOps pipeline significantly.
Inadequate test environment coverage
To make sure your application is reliable and robust in production, you need to be able to test it thoroughly. However, if your test environment doesn’t adequately mirror your production environment, you won’t be able to identify potential issues with the product correctly. This can lead to issues when releasing new features or updating existing ones.
For testing environments to be effective at their job, they should be as close as possible to the real thing: they should have access to the same data sources (e.g., databases), use similar hardware components (e.g., CPUs), run on an operating system similar enough in configuration and libraries (e.g., Linux vs RedHat) that they’ll behave similarly in response actions taken by developers attempting those actions within each environment.
Lack of employee buy-in
Employee buy-in is critical. Without it, your organization won’t make the most of DevOps and its potential to transform your business. If a team doesn’t feel like they’re part of the process or doesn’t see how their work affects it, they’ll be tempted to slack off. That’s not good for anyone’s productivity.
If you want employees’ buy-in, make sure they understand how the DevOps process can benefit them personally and professionally:
- Employees will see how their work fits into the overall process (and why that matters).
- They’ll understand how their work contributes to company goals such as growth or profitability—and that these are things worth striving for together as a team.
Employees also want to feel like they can contribute ideas that improve efficiency and boost productivity at every step along the way—the more involved everyone feels with this new system from start to finish, the more likely it is that people will adopt it wholeheartedly and keep using it long after the initial training has ended.
Conclusion
If any of these bottlenecks is slowing down your DevOps pipeline, you need to take action. Implementing a DevOps pipeline can be daunting but achieving incredible speed and agility in your software development process is well worth the effort. It starts with identifying the bottlenecks in your workflow and then setting up solutions that eliminate them by adopting new technologies or processes.