DevSecOps: 4 Challenges Digital Product Leaders Must Overcome

Planning ways to develop the work with the team and finding solutions that help companies’ daily lives are the great challenges for CIOs today. Like any job that is done by many people, coordination is a challenge for IT leaders. When you have many engineers (tens or hundreds) working on the same code, there are many scaling and control challenges. In this type of scenario, the deployment of the DevSecOps culture has become popular.

With the set of practices and tools for integration between software development, operations (infrastructure or sysadmin) and support teams involved (such as quality control), teams have more time and freedom to deal with more challenging projects and work in business problems. However, in addition to prepared and engaged people, the implementation of a DevSecOps culture also requires technology.

Team challenges to be overcome by engineering leaders:

1. Partial organizational transformation (the silo problem)

DevSecOps in operation does not mean immediate improvement in delivery speed, especially when the implementation of principles is included only in the engineering department. For maximum use, ideally, everyone (product/business team, marketing, designers/UX and IT engineers) work together, forming a single team, which must share and pursue the same goals and results – always focusing on the end customer.

With this, the chance of success is greater due to the reduction of silo overhead. With everyone engaged – and with good development practices – from designer and software engineering, the objectives and results will certainly be achieved.

2. Reluctance to fail

DevSecOps creates a more fault-tolerant environment, but that doesn’t mean fault-free. After a failure, many organizations new to DevSecOps make the post-mortem mistake of assigning blame to a point in the workflow. Instead, treat failure as a learning opportunity. Continuous delivery also means continuous testing.

3. Too many things, too fast

One good reason many companies switch to a DevSecOps model is that their development teams are overwhelmed. Additionally, an excessive workload can also cause a deployment to fail.

Introducing new tools and processes to a team that is already struggling to manage the workload is a recipe for chaos, employee burnout and high turnover. The tip here is to provide support, for example, by investing in team training and relying on a partner company to give “breath” by adding people with know-how and experience in the new practices and technologies that will be adopted.

4. Total Product Anarchy

Flexibility can be both a blessing and a curse. In more chaotic environments, ill-judged features and re-plans can be deployed, corrected or even rolled back, causing frustration and compromising the end-user experience.

DevSecOps does not preach the extinction of controls and safeguards; on the contrary, the idea is that all of them are maintained or expanded, but in an automated way. That is, everything that is currently performed manually and operationally should ideally be converted into an engineering solution that automates this part of the process. Thus, all policies and controls are maintained without affecting the “time to market” of new product features and without compromising the end user experience.

Having tools that enable concurrent development, such as GitHub Enterprise, ensures better experiences for the team, in addition to providing a level of automation and intelligent collaboration that streamlines multiple tasks, accelerating development and providing end-to-end security.

It is essential that the adoption of this type of platform is conducted by specialists in the tool and that it aims at achieving business results. One must never lose sight of the results sought by the Business Case, which led to the approval of the investment.

Undoubtedly, the DevSecOps culture contributes not only to more agile development, but also to the acceleration of digital products. IT and product leaders need to have a strategic and attentive eye for the ever-evolving digital transformation, as well as collaborative development.

With CIOs attentive to new trends, the team develops innovative work, based on collaboration, reuse and optimization, which generates great opportunities for the business that needs to stand out in the midst of so much competition.