How has offshore development changed with DevOps?

Information Technology has come a long way in helping businesses reach their goals. Additionally, the IT industry has also created unprecedented-superior customer experiences. The IT professionals have found out methodologies and approaches to develop software more efficiently and effectively.

DevOps is one such transformation that will help businesses break the silos and aims for efficient software delivery. A combination of Development (Dev)and Operations (Ops) is DevOps that unites people, process, and technology to provide value to their customers. DevOps helps businesses accelerate their time to market, adapt to market trends & competition, maintain system stability & sustainability, and enhance their mean time to recovery. 

Offshore software development is never an easy task. Similarly, DevOps is not an easy one. Although both the processes have their unique advantages, trying to do them together is quite challenging. For efficient collaboration, adapting to new tools is quintessential. Let’s analyse the impact of offshore development with DevOps. 

How has offshore development changed with DevOps?

• Enhanced Product Quality: 

Quality has always been a basic requirement for any business. It is also the best way to control the development costs. With offshore development, businesses found it difficult to balance the quality and costs. The result was that they could focus only on one aspect, overpassing the other. But, a combination of offshore development and DevOps will help software development teams to control the quality and costs simultaneously. As the teams are well collaborated, identifying the bugs can be an easy task. Hence, enhance the quality, reducing the rework and ultimately reducing costs. 

• Emphasising culture

Offshore development majorly focuses on tools and technologies required to generate outcomes. But, the use of DevOps has transformed the culture of the development process. DevOps focuses on tools & technologies and brings about collaboration and communication between the teams that help drive the best outcomes. DevOps has now transformed the offshore development process as the teams have started focusing on the culture as the foundation of the software development process. 

• Timely Delivery of Software:

After the analysis and design completion, the documentation is sent to remote developers to code and test in the offshore development process. However, DevOps transformed the entire software development process by enhancing collaboration between teams. It also helps in releasing software that is bite-sized so that teams get good visibility and feedback. This process helps build faster feedback loops, fasten the momentum at which the company can test hypotheses of what the client needs. It can all be done without investing much time and effort. Hence, delivering the software product faster to the market. 

• Eliminating Handovers

The offshore software development process is all about transferring work from one person to another. If one person in a team finishes his/her work and the milestone is achieved, then he/she will notify the other person to start working. However, DevOps is the exact opposite of the offshore process. It allows different teams to work on various aspects during the software development process. Hence, reducing delays or hand-offs. Software development teams need not wait for the “go-ahead” command to start working. Instead, they can drive continuous collaboration through the entire software development life cycle, keep track of tasks across coding, unit testing, building scripts, configuring scripts, and avoiding rework. 

• Use of Analytical Dashboards:

Offshore teams have been having difficulty in getting visibility into the project status. But, DevOps has initiated wider use of analytical dashboards. These dashboards provide a single source of truth for the organisation. Additionally, they also provide real-time updates on project status, issues, challenges, and improvement opportunities. As a result, Software development teams who use these tools can easily resolve the issues faster and make the entire offshore development process effective. 

• Managing out-of-scope requests

Offshore development teams have been finding it difficult to manage out-of-scope requests and cater to emergency patch-up works which come unannounced. It happens due to the differences in time zones. DevOps helps in clear visibility of the project’s scope by allowing several iterations of communication between the internal team and offshore team. Any out-of-scope requests can be accomplished based on the resources available. 

Wrapping Up

While there were a few challenges while implementing the offshore development process, the advent of DevOps transformed the process completely. The offshore teams could break departmental silos with DevOps and drive a cultural shift towards efficient software delivery. The results were improved product quality, faster time-to-market, eliminating wasteful hand-offs, offering real-time visibility of the product development status and managing out-of-scope requests. The impact of DevOps on offshore development processes will deliver great results in the years to come.