Contents
Prologue
Most people, when answering the question “What is IT?”, most likely will say that IT is programmers. And it will be unexpected for them that, in addition to developers, there are project managers, business analysts, product owners, scrum masters, testers, and DevOps. And the work of all these specialists is aimed at maintaining and improving user satisfaction, which means strengthening their company’s position in the market and gaining more competitive advantages. In other words, in order to realize such goals, a DevOps-oriented team must work. And the task of such a team is not only to change traditional thinking but also to use the right tools. These tools must be up-to-date, meet the necessary requirements and quickly adapt to changing conditions. Of course, if a company does not have the ability to apply the necessary tools itself, this should not become a problem. The necessary assistance and support will always be provided by blockchain devops specialists.
Product Development Life Cycle Models
Today there are different opinions regarding DevOps. Somewhere DevOps is praised, arguing that this is a cool technology and almost the only panacea for all problems, and DevOps specialists are the arbiters of the fate of any IT company, and only thanks to their work, business prosperity is possible. Let’s try to figure out what is hidden behind this concept – DevOps.
First of all, let’s remember how the software development lifecycle originally functioned. Traditionally, the stages of development were like steps down which water flows. Hence the name of such a model – “cascade” or “waterfall.” This meant that all phases in this model went sequentially one after another. First, the requirements for the software were determined, then they were analyzed and the design began. After the design, development, and testing followed, and, in the end, the software went into operation. As a result, the customer saw only the final product, and the testing itself was carried out only at the end. This meant that if there was any problem, it was impossible to turn back and start moving up the stairs to the beginning.
The next way out of the situation was proposed – to involve testers in each phase of the development life cycle. We received the so-called V-shaped model, in which checks began to be carried out at each stage. The result was obtained – the number of errors was significantly reduced. However, such a result could not be called completely successful, since the process was influenced by the human factor. In other words, missing an error during checks was not uncommon. In addition, the development of web services has leveled the possibility of developing products according to this model.
As a result, two more development models were proposed – incremental and spiral. They were similar in that they offered to break the product development process into pieces. In other words, initially only limited functionality of some new product was issued. Users were then asked to indicate additional required options, about which reviews was collected. Based on the results of the analysis of reviews, more and more “chips” were added to the product, and as a result, a cool product was obtained. At the same time, it was possible at each stage to either refuse some option or change the vector of development. There were also differences between these two models. For example, when applying the spiral model, the risks were assessed in more depth, and with each turn of the spiral, the development process became more complicated. And on the basis of the incremental model, a technology called “agile development” appeared.
Epilogue
If you look closely at the V-shaped, incremental, and spiral models, you can see one of their main drawbacks. It lies in the fact that none of the models provides for the impact on the development of the product by the specialists of the operation stage. At the same time, often the problems that sysadmins faced were born precisely by programmers or managers. The constant emergence of conflict situations between developers and operators led to the realization of the need for some new approach to software development. Under the new realities, operators need to be involved in software development and know how it works, and developers need to understand how their code behaves on servers. And in the end, both those and others must jointly solve problems, if they appear in production.
Since the new approach was not the result of any scientific theory, it quickly acquired a large number of followers and acquired a wide variety of tools. Thanks to these tools, the entire infrastructure was transferred to code, all processes were automated to the maximum, after which features began to appear like mushrooms after rain. This has benefited not only all participants in the software development life cycle, but, of course, the business as a whole.
So, let’s sum up our brief digression into the concept of DevOps. Obviously, in a broad sense, DevOps is a philosophy, a lifestyle, a set of best practices. And in a narrower sense, DevOps is an engineer who understands many things in operation, administration, understands development, can implement automation, and so on.
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