How a DevOps Assembly Line Can Speed up Pipeline Movement

DevOps has changed how code is managed between teams, breaking down silos and increasing productivity by merging developers and operations. It’s an approach founded on agile operations, and its popularity continues to grow within the developer community.

Notable for its ability to promote the value of cross-collaboration across the entire lifecycle and pique the interest of many to enter its booming landscape, DevOps has continued to evolve throughout the years. As more and more businesses see the advantages of an agile working environment, there is an even greater need to introduce DevOps assembly lines to the mix.

Difference Between CI pipelines and DevOps Assembly Lines

While CI pipelines support complex workflows, helping to define the CI in stages, they still offer limitations to developers. As only one activity in the assembly line, CI pipelines fall short of promoting the cross-collaboration that DevOps assembly lines are so well known for.

This is why so many teams are starting to place more of a focus on assembly lines instead of CI pipelines – all because they are more efficient at scaling workflows and ensuring continuous delivery. These assembly lines help create a mobile DevOps environment where new software can be developed and tested within a close-knit team.

Whether you host B2B platforms or use an eCommerce model, DevOps assembly lines have the ability to transform the operations of your company with their ability to scale continuously.

Still unconvinced? We’ve analyzed seven ways a DevOps assembly line can speed up pipeline movement in your team, maximizing productivity and efficiency.

Breaks Down Silos and Allows for Easier Cross-Collaboration

Unlike CI pipelines that focus on one activity in the assembly line, DevOps assembly lines bring together different parts of the team to help get the job done. As well as their ability to foster collaboration, they leverage automation in various ways to ensure a software’s product development is accelerated. 

Fusing teams and activities together, such as configuration management and server patching, these assembly lines help speed up movement in the pipeline by decreasing the time it takes a product to go through its lifecycle.

In this way, DevOps assembly lines help break down silos and close the DevOps skills gap. A problem often encountered with CI pipelines is miscommunication across departments, especially when CI fails. Even if only one component is executed unsuccessfully, it will still result in the entire operation being marked as a failure in CI. 

DevOps assembly lines solve this problem by bridging the gap between different silos, offering teams the chance to work on up to seven activities simultaneously.

Consider installing a CPaaS model platform to support this cross-team collaboration. Since it’s on a larger scale, you still might want to give developers a space of their own to communicate ideas with their department members. These can then be relayed to the other departments when necessary via collaborative software.

If you’re still unsure what this might look like, the CPaaS definition refers to a cloud-based platform that enables developers to add communication tools to their applications - particularly useful when getting initial ideas and thoughts down.

Brings Together Workflows, Tools, and Platforms

Using automation in conjunction with manual tasks, DevOps assembly lines produce a streamlined workflow that brings together different tools and platforms. You can create a workflow from scratch using workflow builder templates. This ensures pipeline delivery operates smoothly to provide software products at an efficient pace – much more so than CI pipelines could.

All these connected tools and platforms cross-collaborate easily and bring a wide-around approach to the delivery of a product, ensuring all departments are focused on different activities but working towards the same purpose. 

To help track this collaboration, it could be useful to implement an employee schedule template; this way, you can check which employee is working on what pipeline, ensuring the pipeline runs smoothly as any issues can be addressed as and when they arise.

Places a Greater Focus on Automation

As touched on briefly before, DevOps assembly lines leverage robotic process automation (RPA) to help support the running of multiple activities at once. This focus on an automation framework also frees up more space for you and your team to work on other tasks that demand your attention.

Perhaps you need to train more hires on handling the automated call distributor properly or need extra time to research enterprise telephony for your business. Using DevOps assembly lines will give your team more time to focus on what matters, leaving automation to help streamline your operations.

Enables Easy Tracking of the Assembly Line

Since DevOps assembly lines break down silos and bring workflows together, they have increased traceability and visibility that allow for easy tracking of the overall assembly line.

Wherever software is in the pipeline, you’ll be able to access and monitor each stage with configuration notifications to help keep you in the loop. This end-to-end monitoring ensures you can address issues as they arise, maximizing efficiency and pipeline movement.

Supports Bi-Modal Applications

Whether you’re using modern or legacy applications, DevOps always includes a wide range of languages and tools to support operations. If you’ve used CI pipelines before, then you probably already know some of the problems you can come up against with this large mix of applications. Workflows can become staggered, and information exchange across silos can be cut.

This is where the power of DevOps assembly lines comes in! With their focus on automation and cross-collaboration, these assembly lines create consistently streamlined workflows across all applications. An application integration software lets you connect various apps together. This enables information to be easily exchanged across silos, helping support your bi-modal boundaries.

Achieves Continuous Deployment

Since DevOps assembly lines leverage automation, individual DevOps activities can all be run at once, which helps to increase productivity and efficiency. However, you can often run into the problem of the inability to fully connect all activities, resulting in poor workflow and miscommunication between departments.

Implementing assembly lines will help solve this issue by connecting DevOps applications and pipelines to the many different workflows, supporting bi-modal applications, and enabling information to be retained with little human intervention.

Promotes Clear Communication Across All Departments

DevOps is founded on the principle of agile operations; cross-collaboration is brought to the forefront of the entire lifecycle of a product. Breaking down silos and bringing workflows together, DevOps assembly lines encourage clear communication across departments.

This clear communication spans all departments, from the most obvious (developers and operations) to the development, security, and product management teams. This cooperation and communication between silos make each member feel valued and like they are taking ownership of certain parts of the project.

This feeling of value is essential to increasing your team’s productivity and efficiency. The more they feel like they are playing a noticeable part in the development of a product, the more likely it is they’ll feel as though what they’re doing is making a difference. 

This is why DevOps assembly lines are so special. Each pipeline can easily be monitored in conjunction with the entire product lifecycle, making it clear to each department how they contributed to its overall success.

Key Takeaway

It’s clear that DevOps assembly lines are growing in popularity amongst the tech community - and for good reason! With their ability to leverage automation, break down silos, and bring together workflows and bi-modal applications, assembly lines are vital in an ever-changing tech environment where increased efficiency is key.

While CI pipelines remain a classic for many, they aren’t something that should be solely relied on. Consider combining your CI pipeline and DevOps assembly line efforts to create a more streamlined workflow that enables multiple tasks to run simultaneously.

When implementing more DevOps assembly lines into your operations, be sure to brief the whole team on the changes that will occur. DevOps requires a slight shift in mindset because of its focus on cross-collaboration and automation, so it’s important your team is onboard.

Consider setting up a unified cloud communications platform, perhaps straying from your conventional communications method and searching for alternatives. This communications platform could come in handy when delegating tasks to different departments, making the monitoring of each activity and pipeline easier to track.

Throughout this entire process, it’s crucial you keep your team on point and focused on each activity they’re given. As most businesses now operate remotely, there’s an even greater risk of lagged productivity and the opportunity for employees to be distracted by other notifications. 

To combat this issue, it could be useful to set up an android kiosk mode setting across all work-from-home devices during certain periods – this will ensure your staff stays focused on the task ahead of them.

In short, DevOps assembly lines are a potentially transformative way of approaching workflow and operations, so handle them with care. If your team is used to a system where silos don’t mix and CI pipelines reign supreme, it’s important to introduce these changes slowly until you pick up your desired team velocity. You don’t want to inundate them with a sudden shift in working practices so take it one step at a time.

Assembly lines are a great way of speeding up pipeline movement, and with a few tweaks to your operational structure, you’ll be able to start seeing some of the many benefits!