Have you jumped into DevOps wagon already? You probably have. But perhaps you still not sure if you are lacking a certain tool in your toolbox if you are working currently with DevOps.

Or maybe your organization or team is starting to plan to fully embrace DevOps and your team is researching what is exactly what to need to install in order to have the perfect toolchain. Perhaps you have a gap in some processes that you are not even aware of. Establishing a good and solid DevOps toolchain will help determine ahead of time the grade of the success of your DevOps practices.

In this blog post, we will be exposing maturity level checklists for different DevOps areas so you have an idea where you at in terms of Continuous Delivery.

We will review the maturity levels from the following DevOps aspects:

• Source code management
• Build automation
• Testing
• Managing database changes
• Release management
• Orchestration
• Deployment and provisioning
• Governance, with insights

Source code management tool

Commonly known as repositories. It works as a version control and can be used to keep track of changes in any set of files. As a distributed revision control system it is aimed at speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.

This is the maturity level checklist. we go from a none or low maturity level to a high maturity state:

• No version control
• Basic version control
• Source/library dependency management
• Topic branches flow
• Sprint/project to branch traceability

Build automation tool

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice that aims for a frequent integration of individual pieces of work. Commonly each person integrates at least once per day giving place to several integrations during the day. Each integration should be verified by an automated Build Verification Test (BVT). These automated tests can detect errors just in time so they can be fixed before they create more problems in the future. This helps to reduce a lot of integration issues since this practice allows to develop faster and in a more efficient way.
This is the automation maturity checklist to see how you are doing in your CI:

• No build automation. Built by hand. Binary check-in.
• Build automated by central system
• Reusable build across apps/projects
• Continuous/nightly builds
• Feedback loop for builds

Testing framework

Testing automatization can be in code, systems, service etc. This will allow the testing each modification made in order to guarantee a good QA. Even the daily or weekly release of code will produce a report that will be sent every early morning. To accomplish this you can install the Selenium app in Clarive.

This checklist will help to determine your testing practices level:

• No tests
• Manual tests
• Automated unit/integration tests
• Automated interface tests
• Automated and/or coordinated acceptance tests
• Test metrics, measurements, and insights
• Continuous feedback loop and low test failure

Database Change Management

It’s important to make sure database changes be taken into consideration when releasing to production. Otherwise, your release team will be working late at night trying to finish up a release with manual steps that are error-prone and nearly impossible to rollback.

Check what is your team’s database management current state:

• Manual data/schema migrations
• Automated un-versioned data/schema migrations
• Versioned data/schema migrations
• Rollback-enabled data/schema migrations

Since databases schema changes are sometimes delicate, make sure to include your DBA team into the peer review process, so that changes are 1) code; 2) can be merged and patched; 3) can be code reviewed.

Release Management and Orchestration

You can fully orchestrate tools that are involved in the process and manage your release milestones and stakeholders with Clarive.

Imagine that a developer makes a change in the code after this happens you need to promote the code to the integration environments, send notifications to your team members and run the testing plan.

Are you fully orchestrating your tools? Find out with this checklist:

• Infrequent releases, releases need manual review and coordination
• Releases are partially automated but require manual intervention
• Frequent releases, with defined manual and automated orchestration and calendaring
• Just-in-time or On-demand releases, every change is deployed to production

Deployment tool

Deploying is the core of how you release your application changes.

How is your team deploying?:

• Manual deployment
• Deployment with scripts
• Automated deployment server or tool
• Automated deployment and rollback
• Continuous deployment with canary, blue-green and feature-enabling technology

Provisioning

As part of deployment, you should also review your provisioning tasks and requirements. Remember that it’s important to provision the application infrastructure for all required environments, keep environment configuration in check and dispose of any intermediate environments in the process.

Yes, provision has also several maturity levels:

• You provision environments by hand
• Environment configuration with scripts as part of deployment
• Provisioning of disposable environments with every deployment
• Full provisioning, disposing and infrastructure configuration as part of deployment
• Full tracking of environment-application dependencies and cost management

We have come a long way doing this with IaC (Infrastructure as Code). Nowadays a lot can be accomplished with less pain using technologies such as containers and serverless, but you still need to coordinate all cloud (private and public) and related dependencies, such as container orchestrators.

In your path to provision automation and hands-free infrastructure, make sure you have a clear (and traceable) path to the Ops part of your DevOps team or organization, making sure to avoid bottlenecks when infrastructure just needs a magic touch of the hand. One way of accomplishing that is to have a separate stream or category of issues assigned to the DevOps teams in charge of infrastructure provisioning. We’ll cover that on a later blog post.

With the right reports, you’d be amazed by how many times releases get stuck in infrastructure provisioning hell…

Governance

Clarive has also productivity and management tools such as with Kaban swimlanes, planning, reports and dashboards that give managers tools to identify problems and teams a way to quickly check overall performance of the full end-to-end process.

Here are the key points to make sure you evolve the overall governance of your DevOps process:

• There is no end-to-end relationship between request (why) and release (when, how, what)
• Basic Dev-to-Ops traceability, with velocity and release feedback
• Full traceability from request to deployment
• Immediate feedback and triggers

There you go, let’s devops like the grownups do

In this post, we have exposed the main Continuous Delivery aspects that every DevOps team should be looking forward to improve and their respective readiness levels. So go with your team and start planning a good DevOps adoption plan 😉

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