Express Computer, India: Cognizant’s Senior Vice President & Global Delivery Head, Security and Engineering, Outlines Seven Steps to Develop Software that Delivers Customer Value

“In today’s fast-paced digital economy, it has become clear that the traditional waterfall-style development processes are too expensive and slow to keep pace with the speed of change,” writes Yoosuf Mohamed. “Delivering software features and functionalities quickly enough to meet the continually changing market demands requires a shift to a DevOps model, which combines software development with operations.” Excerpts:

“Here are seven essential steps that can help application developers unlock value within their legacy applications, beat competition and win customer adoption and loyalty by producing innovative products and services.

Step 1: Pair programming. Organizations can start a new approach to software development by getting programmers to collaborate in a paired development environment.

Step 2: Continuous integration, continuous delivery. Speed to market is essential to keep pace with business demands and to maintain relevance. It is this need for speed that has made continuous integration and delivery of code essential.

Step 3: Test-driven development. Developers should adopt a test-driven development approach that involves first writing the test code that describes the expected behaviour of implementation and then running the test. Any changes can now be quickly made and validated without interruptions.

Step 4: Balanced teams. A balanced team is a self-contained, interconnected DevOps group of six to eight team members that is independent of other groups in the company. Its members rotate roles and bring different yet complementary skillsets to achieve a common goal.

Step 5: Feedback. A culture of team work with a shared sense of empathy is critical for a DevOps team.

Step 6: Build, Measure, Learn with MVPs. The build-measure-learn process involves building a minimum viable product (MVP), measuring its acceptance and use and enhancing or adapting it as needed.

Step 7: Eliminate waste. Cost is an important consideration for development teams. Today, there is an increased cost component attached to talent acquisition and skilling, thereby pushing up the development costs as well. Therefore, all resources should be focused only on what helps meet their daily and weekly goals.

Making these seven changes in the software development process requires resilience and determination. Overcoming the roadblocks brought in by such changes, ironing out inconsistencies, and persisting on this journey is critical for organizations determined to effect a change.”

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