Different Ops involved in the modern application development lifecycle
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Cloud and mobile applications development dominate the majority of digital solutions and enablement. As this area is fast growing and new things are announced more frequently, the need to reinvent how we develop and deliver applications becomes vital. It is the key to a successful digitally enabled application development team.
Application development teams are the core of many operations. Let us see in detail some of the operations that Dev teams are involved in -
1. JM Ops — Enterprises do Journey mapping on the product with different scenarios. It is not a one-time process. Different business stakeholders meet recursively and conduct journey mapping sessions to arrive at a final product. As the business is evolving with technology and technology being the pillar of how the enterprises are run, dev teams utilize the journey mapping to understand the high-level use cases of the solution that they are going to develop.
2. UI&UX Ops — As the product is finalized in the JM Ops, the design team starts building the UI and UX to give the final appearance for the application. The design team works with the Dev teams in the form of grooming to understand the feasibility of achieving the designed UI/UX while implementation.
3. IT Ops — As the project moves from business to IT for implementation and delivery, there is a lot of handoffs that take place before the developed product is given back to the business team. Information like business problems, stakeholders involved, approval flows, business benefits, impacted teams, and so on are handled by the IT Ops team. Dev team is also involved by providing the LoE and agreeing to a commitment of when the product can be implemented and delivered.
4. Scrum Ops — This is a vital operational ceremony that every team member in a dev team participates in. This helps the team members to quickly update the status and talk about the blockers they are facing in their deliverables. The scrum master takes note of the discussion and reaches out to specific teams for other needs. Knowing the statuses helps in deploying the software within the scrum team and within the sprint team.
5. Sec Arch Ops — Security architecture is important for the dev team to determine the overall architecture of the application. The security team approves the architecture of the applications considering all the layers presented by the team. It is not a one-time process for the dev team. They work with the security team to perform vulnerability scanning, security checks on the code, penetration and hack testing, and so on.
6. Cloud Sec Ops — Developers are provided with cloud console access for developing applications. Cloud Sec Ops take care of providing only the needed access to the developers. Dev teams work with them to gain roles and permissions on the needed resources at a regular interval.
7. DB Ops — The database team spins up the DB instances and controls the access to the database. Dev teams work with the DB team to understand CPU usage, the number of connections opened and active, long-running queries, etc., to determine the performance and load on the database. Efficient running of the database helps in the high quality of the application.
8. DA Ops — Data architecture team helps determine the right DB schema design for the application needs. They also help the dev team with choosing the right type of database. DA is also a centralized resource within the enterprise and they facilitate data sharing and availability across teams and applications.
9. Net Ops — Networking enables ingress and egress traffic between systems. Dev teams work closely with the networking teams and make them understand the need for communication between the systems. This is generally facilitated through a Firewall Change Request.
10. Identity Ops — Identity is the first leg in most customer journeys. Customer to an enterprise can be their employees or their customers to their product. Different identity solutions are chosen for various applications depending on the needs. The identity solutions help in providing a universal SSO to the customers. Dev teams work with the identity team to extend the solutions not just for authentication but also for authorization using stateless oAuth 2.0 standards.
11. Git Ops — With the rapid application development model and increasingly fast-to-go market strategies, development teams look for flexibility in the deployment timelines and windows. Git Ops provides necessary tools and standards for the dev teams to handle and manage their deployment cycles.
12. Infra Ops — Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) is more increasing among the developer community. Apart from coding for the application the development team also ensures that the right infrastructure is being deployed for the application. Thanks to the different resources offered by various cloud providers, it is easy for dev teams to utilize specific resources for specific needs and manage them through IaaC.
13. GRC Ops — As the development teams work increasingly with varieties of frameworks, libraries, tools, vendors, etc., it becomes vital to centralize the GRC operations
Governance — Inputs from different dev teams help senior executives in the enterprise to plan for the enterprise management strategy and control
Risk — Dev teams provide the GRC team with the information about the data being shared with 3rd party that may potentially involve any technological risk
Compliance — Dev teams work closely with the GRC to ensure that all the compliance is met as per the application needs
14. 3rd Party Ops — CTO office determines the technology landscape with short-term and long-term goals. However, the CTO office can not cater to the needs of every single team in the enterprise. Rather it ensures that the delivery team’s decision-making aligns with the high-level roadmap of the CTO office. Enterprises increasingly move towards the bottom-up approach to listen to teams and their needs before choosing the 3rd party solutions. It is clear that dev teams increasingly influence the buy vs build decisions at the enterprise level. After all, it is the dev teams who will be more frequently working with the vendors to achieve the application delivery goals.
15. AI&ML Ops — Data science and analytics provide insights to the enterprise, customers, dev teams, support teams, and many more from various parameters. The application dev team and the data science team need to work very closely to achieve and arrive at the below -
- Dev team — When, what, and where to collect the data?
- Data science team — Why do we need this data, and how to process the data?
16. Support Ops — Dev teams have to understand the process involved in Incident management, IT service desk management, Customer support desk management to ensure they provide all the information that will be needed by them. Contact center AI based solutions are emerging in this area. Sometimes a detailed FAQ, known issue documents, knowledge management databases help in passing the information across the teams by maintaining a common source.
17. Service Ops — Enterprises open up customer services with an omnichannel experience. The feedback from the customer is received on the web, mobile, voice assistants, social media, and so on. These omnichannel experiences are funneled through a single source of response platform. Dev teams work with different channel partners to understand how the response can be provided back to the customer in a timely and intuitive way.
18. Fin Ops — The 3 phases of Fin Ops involve inform, analyze and operate. Dev teams will need to understand the importance of the unit economics and the benefits it provides by tagging the IT resources to respective business units. Input from dev teams is crucial for the fin ops teams to succeed and make cloud truly an innovation center and not a cost center.
Share your thoughts on the various ops that you came across or your team uses and that helped the team in becoming a rapid application development and delivery team.
Happy learning!
Originally published at http://shankarkumarasamy.blog on September 27, 2021.
