Balancing Velocity and Quality in DevOps
Key Points
- DevOps bridges the traditionally opposing goals of development (rapid change delivery) and IT operations (system stability), turning conflict into collaboration.
- The transformation delivers two core benefits—greater velocity in moving applications through the release pipeline and higher quality to protect a company’s digital reputation.
- By aligning DevOps with business agility, enterprises can respond faster to consumer demands, market shifts, and improve overall time‑to‑market.
- Application delivery is framed as a supply‑chain pipeline: ideation/user stories → coding → build (unit testing, packaging) → manage (deployment across environments) → learn (continuous improvement).
- To enhance both speed and quality, organizations focus on three primary use‑cases, starting with optimizing core systems (the transcript cuts off before describing the remaining two).
Sections
- DevOps: Balancing Speed and Quality - Andrea Crawford explains how DevOps reconciles the opposing goals of development (rapid change) and IT operations (stability) to deliver faster, higher‑quality releases that boost business agility and time‑to‑market.
- Optimizing Core, Legacy, and Digital Pipelines - The speaker outlines three DevOps use‑cases—retrofit automation for deep‑core legacy systems, cultural transformation to unlock legacy applications, and cloud‑native continuous delivery—to boost speed and quality throughout the software supply chain.
Full Transcript
# Balancing Velocity and Quality in DevOps **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbtB4sMaaNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbtB4sMaaNM) **Duration:** 00:05:52 ## Summary - DevOps bridges the traditionally opposing goals of development (rapid change delivery) and IT operations (system stability), turning conflict into collaboration. - The transformation delivers two core benefits—greater velocity in moving applications through the release pipeline and higher quality to protect a company’s digital reputation. - By aligning DevOps with business agility, enterprises can respond faster to consumer demands, market shifts, and improve overall time‑to‑market. - Application delivery is framed as a supply‑chain pipeline: ideation/user stories → coding → build (unit testing, packaging) → manage (deployment across environments) → learn (continuous improvement). - To enhance both speed and quality, organizations focus on three primary use‑cases, starting with optimizing core systems (the transcript cuts off before describing the remaining two). ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbtB4sMaaNM&t=0s) **DevOps: Balancing Speed and Quality** - Andrea Crawford explains how DevOps reconciles the opposing goals of development (rapid change) and IT operations (stability) to deliver faster, higher‑quality releases that boost business agility and time‑to‑market. - [00:03:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbtB4sMaaNM&t=195s) **Optimizing Core, Legacy, and Digital Pipelines** - The speaker outlines three DevOps use‑cases—retrofit automation for deep‑core legacy systems, cultural transformation to unlock legacy applications, and cloud‑native continuous delivery—to boost speed and quality throughout the software supply chain. ## Full Transcript
Hi, I'm Andrea Crawford with IBM Cloud.
We're going to talk today about DevOps.
As the name implies,
DevOps is about bringing together
2 traditionally contentious groups within IT organizations:
application development, which has primarily been measured on
the number of changes, features, and defects fixed
that are able to be pushed out into production,
whereas IT operations,
and their success, is primarily measured on system stability, availability.
So, we have one group with pushing more changes,
and another group that saying don't push any changes.
So, let the fireworks begin!
DevOps transformation
is an important part to our client's transformation strategies in general.
Particularly because of 2 main benefits.
One of those being velocity.
Velocity in terms of how quickly products or applications
can be piped through this release pipeline.
The second benefit: quality.
It's not enough just to be quick in terms of
how fast applications are delivered,
but we also must be cognizant of the quality of what gets delivered on the
other end of that pipeline.
Digital reputations are at stake here, so quality and velocity
both need to be balanced.
The war between application development and IT operations really has one big loser and
that is the business, because you see the benefits are really going to manifest themselves
in terms of business agility through are being responsive to consumer demands, to changing
market conditions, and basically improving overall time to market of what an enterprise
can deliver to its consumers.
If you were to think of application delivery as a supply chain, or a pipeline, we really
have this notion of ideation, user stories, what should be delivered in terms of adding
value to the business and its consumers.
So, we have ideation over here. This is also on in the form of a user stories,
work items, and the like.
Then we have the coding piece. This is all about programming the idea from the user story.
And then we have Build. This piece here includes unit test cases, packaging of the code into
executables, and run times that will actually be then deployed on some sort of run time
environment, be it bare metal, virtualized environment, or the cloud.
And then we have Manage, and this is all about addressing what happens to an application
once it lands in its runtime environment. And this is primarily focused on production,
but it can also be management in terms of what you have in dev, test, pre-prod,
and the like.
And, then to round out the supply chain here, we've got Learn - and this is all about continuous
improvement. So, not only do we need to understand are we getting faster as we deliver applications,
but is the quality improving, too? So, we want to make sure that our benefits are being
achieved throughout the pipeline here.
So, if we were to identify the use-cases for how to increase velocity and quality in the
pipeline there are really 3 primary use-cases. The first is optimizing the core. By core
systems, I mean we those systems that are deep within the enterprise. These tend to
be monolithic, legacy, big systems of record. Typically, these applications are very difficult
to modernize, re-factor, and the like. DevOps for the core often looks like retrofitting
automation in situ, you so that we can optimize what we've got.
The second use case is about unlocking the legacy. So, this is all about addressing culture,
ways of working, and bringing development and operations together in new ways, integrated
multi-disciplinary teams, and this amps up any kind of automation that we could have
done in the core.
And then the last: unleashing the digital. So, with the maturation of cloud-native apps,
12-factor, Kubernetes, and Docker, were all about continuous delivery from ideation all
the way through to continuous improvement and rounding back to the beginning.
So, what we learned that we can do better we feed it back into the pipeline. This is all about
modern applications delivered by modern teams on modern platforms. So, if we were to sum
all of this up, DevOps is all about people, process, and tools for the benefit of
business agility.
Thanks for watching this video. If you have any questions or comments be sure to
drop a line below. If you want to see more videos like this in the future,
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