Evolve by adding Biz to your DevOps

Companies and tech teams are walking towards adopting DevOps culture, in order to achieve some of these improvements:

• Faster recovery rate from failures;
• Faster development of company’s applications than competitors;
• Lower time and effort spent on unplanned work and bug fixing;

These, among other benefits, help I.T. delivering faster and reliable software. Although, they do not guarantee that business requirements are delivered exactly as needed with adequate time to market.

To add business value it’s necessary to seek customers happiness (customer journey) and to build and deliver business strategy faster than competitors. That being said, this puzzle is solved by adding these last two important pieces: I.T. team as the one responsible for providing the best technologies and software delivery methodologies. And the last piece: business team, the owner of the company knowledge. BizDevOps is the next generation of DevOps, as it brings business, developers and operations people together in each stage of the process.

This diagram illustrates well a BizDevOps lifecycle:

By using this methodology it’s possible to remove barriers that once slowed down development process: business users work closely with development team, or even develop business rules and processes themselves.

Company processes and rules have no longer the need to be documented since it’s now an software asset that is converted into code itself. Processes and rules can have it’s own separate projects and lifecycle, consequently being created as a cloud-native service inside of a microservices architecture and delivered through a CI/CD pipeline.

“Business processes and rules are now assets that can be automated and improved continuously”

In a short sentence, how does it work?

“Ops team provides and monitor a proper environment so other teams deliver. Biz team will create business assets that can consumed by services created by Devs.”

In other words, when adopting this methodology, business knowledge becomes automated assets developed by it’s own owners, consumed by developers in isolate, persistent, performant and secure services delivered in a highly available and reliable environment.

To achieve this it is necessary to use the right methodology, have people adopting the culture, and using the right tools – business automation tools like jBPM.

Stay tuned

In next articles I’ll talk more about how you can bring your company’s business team closer to your development cycle, and how this can help you build better software architecture and apps.

Stay tuned, keep calm, and embrace changes!