Gartner Recommends Companies Adopt Value Stream Delivery Platforms To Scale DevOps

Gartner recently published the Market Guide for DevOps Value Stream Delivery Platforms (VSDPs). The study showed that the rapid rise of value stream delivery platforms (VSDPs) results from businesses’ inability to streamline software development and delivery.

Companies need a way to scale DevOps to deliver innovation safely and quickly, and VSDPs are proliferating to meet the needs of an increasingly complex DevOps process. The collision between cobbled together toolchains with remote work has revealed companies’ issues managing software development. As the work becomes siloed, visibility into the progress of work in process fades to black:

• The inability to integrate all of the various development tools and environments reduces the ability to catch security issues before new features are released.
• Unintegrated tools and non-standard DevOps environments block collaboration.
• And disparate agile and DevOps tools are limiting process improvements.

Adopting a VSDP eliminates these problems and enables you to scale. In fact, Gartner’s market report found that early adopters of VSDPs are experiencing exponential gains in continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) and the ability to deliver business value.

Diving into Value Stream Delivery Platforms

A VSDP is a fully integrated set of tools and capabilities that streamline software development and support continuous software delivery. Capabilities may include:

• Build and test automation
• Project or product planning
• Continuous integration
• Release orchestration
• Continuous deployment and rollback
• Automated security policy enforcement

VSDPs provide visibility for the entire development cycle and key-value stream metrics. The unified platforms reduce complexity and increase visibility across the application development value stream.

Business Benefits of VSDP

Gartner finds multiple benefits in VSDP for software development and deployment. 

VSDPs eliminate most of the complexity in DevOps toolchains and meet the needs of multiple production teams. They streamline workflow for the application delivery lifecycle, enhancing your ability to visualize, trace, audit, and observe the entire DevOps pipeline.

Cross-functional alignment, process standardization, and the visibility of shared goals allow everyone to understand each project's value. You can easily promote crucial development and keep your works in progress in balance.

Furthermore, these platforms use the cloud to support remote development teams. Every member of the development team, from admins to architects, uses the VSDP to collaborate on code reviews, share code, and track issues. Moreover, the annual State of DevOps Report shows more reasons for adopting lean software practices and value stream management:

• reduce burn-out rates
• improve culture and work environments
• enhance team performance

What trends are leading to the rise of VSDP?

The need for lean development and visibility into the software value stream are deeply rooted in digital transformation and increasing pressure to deliver innovation (and value) faster:

• massive adoption of cloud computing
• container-native architecture
• increased use of agile development
• pressure for DevOps to create business value

As lean manufacturing principles continue to invade software development, companies need scalable solutions for removing waste from their processes to ensure the steady flow of value to customers. To achieve this, you need visibility into both your throughput and your delivery processes. When you can assess quality of work and quality of process, you can make continual improvements in both the work you deliver and how you deliver it, helping get better quality features in the hands of business users faster.

Problems Scaling DevOps

Companies struggle to scale DevOps and optimize delivery because they’re using multiple-point solutions to manage various parts of the process. Often, the disparate tools are unable to manage the full process and integrating multiple technologies increases complexity, leaving your team with bottlenecks, redundant processes, and no end-to-end visibility. 

Product teams have little success in reducing the time to market or delivering faster customer value due to constraints and lack of visibility into their own workflow. Platform teams grapple with building scalable and secure DevOps environments as organizations transition to remote work and reduce infrastructure and operations costs.

Research from Gartner shows that VSDPs are the key to scaling software delivery, improving security, and quickly driving value for the customer. A VSDP replaces the poorly integrated toolchains currently used by many DevOps teams with a single solution to boost visibility and collaboration.

Selecting the Right VSDP

Very few companies have been able to bring together DevOps tools and agile processes to enable continuous improvement. Many VSDP solutions require open-source tools or third-party integrations to plug the gaps, despite differentiating themselves with key capabilities. For example, some VSDP providers natively include a source code and artifact repository while others tout their container-native deployments.

You may run into further constraints if the vendor you select limits your choice of application architecture. Or the VSDP won’t integrate with the necessary tools to support the missing functionality. This lack of flexibility burdens DevOps with a potentially suboptimal development environment. 

Copado combines technical DevOps tools, agile management and analytics suite into a true end-to-end platform that enables, measures, and optimizes your software development. 

From a complete CI/CD process to secure code enforcement, Copado is the ultimate VSDP you’ve been looking for. You’ll be able to: 

• Plan, create, verify, deploy, and release using agile work processes.
• Leverage Copado’s SFDC native experience and 100% Salesforce native integration.
• Use the pre-built integrations for agile planning, integrated development environments (IDE), testing, monitoring, security, and compliance.
• Enforce 100% of the Salesforce security rules, including all major certifications and encrypted credentials.
• Place your repositories on-premise or in the cloud.
• Measure throughput and process with DevOps Analytics 360 and Value Stream Maps.

Copado works with countless tools so that you can increase Salesforce ROI and your existing tools. There is no reason you need to replace your entire toolchain.

Find out how a value stream development platform takes DevOps to a whole new level in Understanding and Managing Success with Value Stream Mapping.