Market forces are pushing technology companies towards increasingly frequent deployments. Agile, DevOps, and test automation are now crucial for IT teams that want to keep up with commercial demands and ensure their businesses remain competitive.

Modern IT solutions demand frequent deployments

Business and consumer markets expect regular and exciting new features and integrations for their favorite apps and services – while demonstrating a low tolerance for bugs. Organizations like banks that handle sensitive customer data have to balance a particularly challenging set of commercial goals.

Users will respond harshly to poor customer experiences – potentially jumping ship and leaving negative reviews if they encounter downtime or can’t access certain features. Waterfall development processes weren’t designed for markets with such rapidly-evolving demands.

Agile and DevOps enable frequent deployments

Agile and Devops approaches allow IT organizations to shift to rapid deployments and become more competitive. These companies can respond to market forces ahead of their competitors, add features aggressively, proactively maintain their app, and deliver higher and more consistent levels of customer experience.

Average industry deployment frequency continues to drop:

• QA professionals reporting daily (or multiple per day) release cycles more than doubled in 2018 – from 11% to 26%.
• But according to recent research, 58% of senior decision-makers in corporate IT now report that their teams deploy daily, or even more frequently – and 26% at least hourly.

However, software testing remains the biggest bottleneck in DevOps teams. That’s why investment in test automation is essential for businesses that want to fully-leverage Agile and DevOps, align their IT processes and business goals, and slash their release cycles in 2019.

Agile and DevOps deliver benefits for big brands

To understand the tangible benefits that Agile and DevOps approaches can offer for IT teams, we can explore a range of positive experiences that multinational technology companies have enjoyed by bridging the gap between development and operations.

Etsy increased its deployment frequency by a factor of 30

Etsy shifted from deploying twice per day to deploying over 60 times per day by building a DevOps mentality into their team and allowing developers to deploy code directly onto their website.

‘…We started to understand that if developers felt the responsibility for deploying code to the site they would also, by nature, take responsibility for if the site was up or down, take into consideration performance, and gain an understanding of the stress and fear of a deploy.’

– Michael Rembetsy – VP of Technical Operations, Etsy

Adobe improved its ability to meet app demand by 60%

Adobe has been able to service 60% more app development demand by switching to a cloud-based platform that speeds up software delivery while letting developers use their preferred choice of tools.

‘[The platform] doesn’t eliminate the complexities or variance within your technology stack… What it does do is provide fairly frictionless integration into the majority of technologies you’d find under the hood.’

– Ryan Granard, VP of cloud operations, Adobe

Target cut its onboarding process from a month to just five days

American retail giant Target reduced its onboard process for new teams and projects from 30 days to just five by giving developers the tools they need to create applications and ship code, and emphasizing self-service. Their goal is to reduce the process to as little as two hours.

“It takes a lot of technology to run a modern retailing company, and that is one of the reasons DevOps is so important.”

– Heather Mickman, senior director of technology services, Target

Every technology organization on the planet has a strong incentive to deploy higher-quality code more quickly. Agile, DevOps, and test automation technologies are the most important tools available for IT leaders who want to drive digital transformation and lead their sector.

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