The strategic combination of Agile planning and DevSecOps delivery has ushered in a new era of accelerated application delivery. This article explores the strategic value of adopting a DevSecOps platform approach and emphasizes the need for a clean and modern software factory to streamline the development process. By leveraging automated tools, this approach empowers development teams to build, test, and deliver working applications faster than ever before.

The DIY Toolchain Dilemma:

While DIY-integrated toolchains have proven effective in speeding up application delivery, they bring along a set of challenges. The introduction of new tools adds complexity, creates islands of data, results in inconsistent security settings, and poses reporting and compliance issues. The resulting toolchain becomes a complex, fragile, and expensive assembly that hinders development teams. These teams are forced to expend valuable cycle time on tinkering with tools, diverting attention from delivering actual value.

The Software Factory: A Solution to Complexity

To address these challenges, the concept of a modern software factory is essential. This factory, equipped with a fully functional assembly line, is designed to be efficient, easy to manage, and capable of quickly building, testing, and delivering applications. The approach involves the strategic use of a DevSecOps platform to automate and streamline software delivery.

Automate and Streamline Software Delivery:

Issues and Planning: The software factory begins with delivery teams capturing, discussing, prioritizing, and defining new requirements and use cases. Issues serve as the foundation for understanding end-user needs and guiding the development process.
Code Reviews and Approvals: Automated testing and consistent approval methods become core capabilities in the software factory. This ensures that new code changes align with user needs and adhere to quality, accountability, and compliance standards.
Distributed Source Code Management: A distributed source code management system facilitates coordination, sharing, and collaboration across the entire software development team, managing branches, changes, and vulnerabilities.
Repository to Manage Binary Assets: The software factory efficiently manages and tracks binary assets produced by the CI pipeline throughout the testing, validation, and deployment phases.
Dynamic Test Environments/Infrastructure: Supporting dynamic test environments deployed on demand, leveraging containerization and cloud technology, reduces delays associated with limited testing resources.
Continuous Delivery (CD): The CD pipeline, a natural extension of the CI pipeline, simplifies the deployment of cloud-native applications, particularly those using Kubernetes environments.
Continuous Integration for Every Commit: The backbone of the software factory, the CI pipeline, automates development tasks for every code change, ensuring the right sequence of tests, scans, and compliance checks is completed.
1. Software Quality Testing: The CI pipeline accelerates testing for every commit, ranging from unit and API tests to functional and non-functional tests, preventing the introduction of defects.
1. Security Testing: Consistent incorporation of security scans into the CI pipeline provides immediate feedback on vulnerabilities or security flaws introduced by code changes, avoiding later rework.
Application Monitoring: Rapid and actionable insight from application monitoring in production empowers developers to detect, take action, and continuously improve the application.
Incremental Deployment: Supporting incremental deployments minimizes risk, and techniques like canary deployments or feature flags give development teams flexibility while actively managing and mitigating risks.

As a DevOps platform, GitLab plays a pivotal role in simplifying the development process. Offering a single, common user experience, a unified security and access model, a single source of truth for reporting and managing development work, simplified compliance and auditing, and a unified governance and compliance model, GitLab enables collaboration across all stakeholders.

The strategic value of adopting a DevSecOps platform approach cannot be overstated. It transforms the traditional software delivery process into a modern software factory, allowing development teams to thrive in an environment that is both efficient and streamlined. By minimizing the complexities introduced by DIY toolchains, the modern software factory ensures that teams can focus on delivering value rather than navigating a complex, fragile toolchain. With a unified approach and tools like GitLab, development teams can embrace simplicity, visibility, and control, paving the way for a future where software development is agile, responsive, and impactful.

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