7 DevOps Best Practices For Outstanding Results

DevOps practices can help you streamline your DevOps processes and conquer DevOps challenges. Here we outline seven DevOps practices.

Follow along or jump ahead to the section that interests you the most.

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What Is DevOps?

To better understand DevOps best practices, let's start with a definition of DevOps.

DevOps is a culture or practice that focuses on a collaborative approach of developing and deploying a software. It requires the cooperation and integration of software developers (Dev) and IT Operations staff (Ops).

7 DevOps Practices & Principles

Here are the top 7 DevOps best practices and principles that you need to follow.

DevOps Best Practice #1. Version Control For All Production Artifacts

Both Dev and Ops should use version control for everything. And they should share the same single source of truth.

DevOps Best Practice #2. Continuous Integration and Deployment

Check in code every day and check into the trunk every day, as opposed to hanging onto private code branches and integrating only at the end of the release. 

📘 Related Content: Best Practices for Safety- and Security-Critical Embedded Software Development

DevOps Best Practice #3. Automated Acceptance Testing

Stop the line not only when the build breaks but also when something breaks. This is true for all software testing, whether it's an automated user test, an integration test, or a system test. This step keeps things in an always-deployable state.

DevOps Best Practice #4. Peer Review of Production Changes

Use peer reviews for better quality; leverage your team’s familiarity, shared goals, and mutual accountability, as opposed to external change approval (such as a change advisory board).

DevOps Best Practice #5. High-Trust Culture

This is both a practice and an outcome result from a single source of truth, peer reviews, and shared goals.

DevOps Best Practice #6. Proactive Monitoring of the Production Environment

Monitor and communicate across the teams so everyone can see, understand, and affect end results and customer utilization.

DevOps Best Practice #7. Win-Win Relationship (and Outcomes) Between Dev and Ops

This approach counters the learned behavior that deployments hurt. By deploying code into production every day, you can change lives in Operations. Deployments don’t have to be done at midnight on Friday with Ops working all weekend to get things running. When Ops employees are working the same hours as Dev, there is a sense of teamwork and joint accomplishment.

Why Product Management Is 1 of the 7 DevOps Best Practices

Product management is an inherent part of all seven of the DevOps best practices.

But why, or how? (Especially when we didn’t list it as one of the 7 best practices above!)

DevOps has become the standard for creating and delivering software. And this shift intertwines product management with DevOps. It makes sense though.

The goal of product management is get the best product to market as quickly as possible. And, once products are with customers, product managers want to ensure the product continually works as well as possible.

And the role of DevOps? Get the best products to market as quickly as possible. Product teams are Ops teams now. So product management is part of all seven DevOps practices.

Why DevOps Practices Require a DevOps Toolset

As the top DevOps practice indicates, organizations should make sure they version everything. And when Ops uses the same version control system as Dev, anybody can reproduce the production environment based on what’s in version control.

Dev and Ops can depend on version control to ensure that changes to the code and environment are continuously being integrated and deployed into the production environment. This results in higher performance and improved collaboration and trust between teams.

Benefit From Built-in DevOps Best Practices with Perforce

DevOps best practices are great. But how do you apply them? 

Perforce offers DevOps tools that help your team adopt DevOps practices. This includes Helix Core version control software.

Helix Core supports DevOps teams and delivers the single source of truth vitally needed to succeed today. It can store all of your teams' code, artifacts, and assets — all in one spot.

Plus, using Perforce Streams — branching in Helix Core — makes it easy to apply DevOps best practices.

Watch the video below to see how Streams can help you with release workflows, development workflows, DevOps automation, and more:

Find out how Helix Core (and branching with Perforce Streams) can help your DevOps team. You can try it for free for up to 5 users and 20 workspaces.

➡️ try Helix Core

Note: This blog was published in March 18, 2015. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.