An integrated ALM/DevOps solution brings a bunch of advantages for the company as a whole. Within that company, every stakeholder will also experience significant time and money savings. It goes without saying that productivity gains for one stakeholder have an impact on the other stakeholders and finally on the entire company. The benefits for an organization as a whole fall down in two categories.
Benefits for an organization as a whole
Tangible (direct financial impact)
- Improved cost and budget management ability
- Reduced time spent to build and deploy applications in production
- Improved time-to-market
Intangible (or more difficult to make tangible)
- Improved release consistency and quality
- Enhanced service to customers
- Timeline improvement of application releases
- Less human mistakes
- Ability to control the development process at any moment
- Maximization of stakeholder satisfaction
- Optimized collaboration between teams
- Creation of an Agile IT environment
Benefits for each of the stakeholders
If we look at the benefits for each of the stakeholders, we can distinguish four important elements: requirements, versioning, build and deploy.
The requirement phase can mainly be linked to the business analysts, the versioning benefits are significant for developers, IT managers and the communication and collaboration through the team, the build benefits are mainly for the release managers and the deploy benefits are mainly applicable for the deployment engineers.
Requirements (Business analysts)
- Better interpretation of requirements
- Visibility and traceability between requirements, tasks, related code and deployments
- Associated client and business collateral with each requirement, including emails, documents, graphics and other related information
- Real-time project status tracking
- Smoother communication and coordination
- Software solution accommodates real business need
Versioning (Developers)
- Imposes a standard way of working for the entire team
- Allows traceability, promotes accountability and makes it easier to find the right person to solve a problem
- Quickly generate of a list of the changes made, making it easier to provide the information on what has changed, and why, from version to version
- No time wasted on old code
- Enhanced team collaboration and communication
- Allows a rollback to earlier versions
- Allows to deliver revisions, updates and cross-platform versions
Automated Compile (Release managers)
- Significantly improves the quality of your product
- Minimizes the number of ‘bad builds’
- Accelerates the compile and link processing
- Eliminates redundant tasks
- Eliminates dependencies on key personnel
- Saves history of builds and releases in order to investigate issues
- Minimizes integration risk
- Less time-consuming
Automated Deploy (Deployment engineers)
- Earlier and more frequent feedback from testers & end-users
- Less human errors
- Significantly increased user confidence
- Creation of an Agile development environment
- Accelerated time-to-market
- Deployment phase is not dependent on one person anymore, more persons can deploy (developers, testers, users etc.)
- Transparency and accountability by centralized deploy repository
- Smoother communication and coordination
- Increased flexibility in resource needs and planning
- Less downtimes
- Less time-consuming
Continue reading in our next post: Editors (Mainframes and DevOps)
About the author
Hello, my name is René De Vleeschauwer.
Throughout my career I've been responsible for the development of enterprise software. Since 12 years I've been leading the development of IKAN ALM, an open DevOps framework.