Challenges in DevOps - Top 10 challenges in implementing or adopting DevOps - DevOps Challenges

DevOps...It is no more a buzzword..You hear this word pretty much every day during your coffee break at work :-)

Transforming to DevOps requires a change in culture and mindset. One of the key benefits of DevOps is to remove silos (the communication barriers between teams) between development and ops teams.  Adopting DevOps to an organization always comes with a lot of challenges. Transitioning to DevOps requires a change in culture & mindset and much more. Let's look at the top 10 challenges and identify ways to overcome them.

1. Cultural change, change in the mindset - Cultural change is the first hurdle any company needs to overcome quickly for adopting devops fully. People should be bit open and welcome this new process change for embracing devops.
2. Not driven top-down, it should be bottom-up - Adoption should come up from ground up, can’t be a top down initiative. Devops starts with a couple of developers and ops folks working together on automation.
3. New tools.. new skills - Learning and Adapting to new set of tools are the key for practicing devops. Teams also should be open for hiring resources with CI/CD and devops skills if they don’t have one.
4. Not picking the right project to get started - It is better to find an existing application or small product (that has full SDLC life cycle) to remodel it into devops in incremental baby steps, earning small but solid wins along the way. This gives confidence to the teams.
5. Not moving away from legacy systems and infrastructure - By migrating monoliths into microservices architecture with automation and continuous delivery can bring faster development.
6. Business expecting quick results after DevOps adoption - Devops change does not happen overnight, it must be smooth and gradual. Business should have some patience to see results.
7. Not automating fully - Pipeline with leaks - Automation should be 100 percent. Pipelines also should integrate with code quality tools such as SonarQube. By doing few things still manually would enable for human error and can slow things down.
8. Not integrating QA automation in CI/CD pipelines - CI/CD pipeline is not fully complete without integrating QA automation execution. Both has to work together, not in silos.
9. Dev and Ops team having completely separate tools set - Both dev and ops need to work together and identify the right tools set. Need to ensure that is aligned within the goals for the organization.
10. Quantifying the impact to top management - This is probably the difficult challenge to overcome. Its first important to benchmark your current state. After that perform maturity assessment every two sprints and compare the results to see if there are any improvements. Looking at SonarQube dash board for reducing code quality defects. Also, scheduling a feedback session with actual users of the application to measure the success also helps.