Harnessing the power of collaboration instruments and practices may unleash the potential of teams practicing DevOps, which involves unlocking collaboration between development, It operations, and business teams.
This enhanced collaboration can cost developers a large chunk of their times and they may be ending up integrating too many tools, work status updating and sharing it with other teams, instead of coding and building innovative solutions. This has clearly come out in a DevOps Trends Survey that the practices which are supposed to make the task easier for developers are actually causing new difficulties for them. Multiple disintegrated tools, manual processing and ever changing collaboration practices are restricting developers in achieving the goals of DevOps process. According to the survey, 90% of the teams expressed about DevOps that there comes a risk of getting lesser time for innovation along with positive impact on the business. 84% stated that they face problems in implementation.
For making developers focusing more in fast and better shipping of their code several new features, automations and integrations have been announced which includes several practices such as fewer meetings, fewer pings from IT about security etc. Let’s discuss about the practices which may help developers being more productive.
- Plan and Track Projects Right in the Context of Your Code: DevOps tool chain is not about application of one-size-fits-all approach. DevOps is a toolbox that applies differently in context of different applications and teams, and this only a developer knows best that what tool or how many are to be used or when they are to be used. This provides a flexibility of application of tools, but with this come a critical need for coordination of the work. The personalized Your Work Dashboard has introduced several new features and it will include Jira issues assigned to users which automatically unifies operation across teams and tools. This enables developers shift quickly between two tasks, without shifting tools.
A new feature DevOps automation triggers has also been added with which developer can create automation rules with just a few clicks, in order to keep all the work sync with development activities. This also enables user to update Jira Issues and creates more complex rules like reassigning Jira issues for Quality analysis and review of code. The user can also send a message to the slack channel of team, related to new PRs. These new automation rules works with all the code repositories that are integrated with Jira Software Cloud.
- Review, test and deploy code without losing your place: Best possible tools for writing and reviewing codes are what every team wants for efficiency. It can maximize the productivity on the every day’s important tasks done by developers. The Pull Request Experience in Bitbucket’s cloud comes with new features such as task list consolidation, Jira issues creation integration, and activity feed filters. This feature provides and innovative design that makes reviewing code changes easier and faster.
The VS Code Integration Extension has also been updated in a way that it brings entire DevOps pipeline into your editor, task list from Jira Software Cloud, complete code-review experience and CI/CD tracking from Bitbucket Pipelines.
- Ship Fast without Breaking Things: Cloud Code Review Experience is now comprising scanning and quality reports. This includes several functions like Mabl test automation, sentry automated monitoring, and synk security integration and all these integrations have been built on open APIs. So, the code insights enable you bringing the best DevOps scanning, testing and analysis tools into the process of code review. Risk Management Engine in Jira Service Desk Cloud rapidly assesses the risk associated with a change and auto-approves and deploy changes with low risk.
Bitbucket Cloud’s new feature automated change management connects the CI/CD pipelines to Jira Service Desk, holds CI/CD process, create a change request in service desk, and trigger the deployment after the approval.
- Mitigate Alert Fatigue and Resolve Incidents Faster: Determining the cause of the problem as soon as possible is the key to faster resolution of the incidents. And with the adoption of DevOps and automation of their deployment processes, failures caused with changes becomes increasingly common. It is always good to detect immediately that the issue is caused due to the code change recently took place and this enables getting immediate help from the right developer. Opsgenie’s new Deep Integration into Jira Software Cloud and Bitbucket Software Cloud assist teams, shortcut this whole process, providing those who respond first an audit trail for deployments done recently and their related Jira tickets. This new integration provide centralized alerts and filtration of unrelated issues, a centralized location has been created by a new incident investigation dashboard where teams can check the deployment that took place right before the incident, add it as a potential cause, and communicate the same to the developer who made the change so that it can be rolled back and resolved.
- DevOps is about Tools and Practices/Culture: Connecting the tools only doesn’t complete the successful DevOps implementation. Citing people and culture, as the top factor, is what the most DevOps practitioners agreed upon. A new DevOps resource hub has been created for community discussions, AMAs, Confluence templates to improve DevOps rituals and set long-term team goals, DevOps guides on how to connect tools like Jira with industry best practices like CI/CD, and more. This hub provides guidance on connecting tools with practices and for cultivating a world-class DevOps culture.
All these features can be helpful for DevOps teams in adopting best DevOps practices in both internal and external communications.
