What Is DevOps in Software Development? Key Concepts

With more and more businesses employing rapid application development (RAD) workflows, switching to DevOps for operational efficiency has become a new norm. Now, more and more teams are strategizing on how to deploy DevOps to incorporate agile, lean and collaborative software collaboration to produce an application with minimal sweat and maximum efficiency.

By utilizing a DevOps software, you manage and monitor all stages of software production and optimize validation and testing without any manual intervention.

Ultimately, it leads to fewer exceptions, infections and bug crashes and optimizes the entire software development lifecycle process.

So, what exactly goes into the DevOps process to ensure consistent app quality and seamless automation?

Let's find out how DevOps merges two cornerstones of app production and centralizes testing, QA, versioning and more. 

DevOps breaks down work silos, syncs environments, and automates code processing—freeing up developer time and effort. Teams operate as a unified force, driving projects from concept to completion.

This collaboration spans the entire DevOps lifecycle, powered by Agile, Scrum, and CI/CD to accelerate development, streamline automation, and boost delivery speed.

What is the DevOps lifecycle and how does it work?

DevOps isn’t a straight-line process, it’s a continuous loop of collaboration, feedback, and automation. Think of it as an infinite cycle where development and operations blend seamlessly, powered by DevOps software tools that automate, monitor, and improve every step.

Each phase of the DevOps lifecycle plays a unique role in delivering software that’s not just fast, but stable, secure, and scalable.

Let’s walk through the key stages:

• Plan: This is where it all begins. Teams define project goals, timelines, and KPIs. Using DevOps project management software, they break work into sprints, create backlogs, and assign roles. The focus? Aligning developers, testers, and ops around a shared vision. The DevOps tools you can use in the planning stages are Jira, Trello and Azure Boards to chart out your software collaboration process.  
• Create: Developers write code, often in branches, using version control tools like Git. Paired programming, linters, and static analysis are integrated into this stage. Automation tools help ensure code is deployment-ready from the start. You can create or initialize your DevOps code writing process with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket.
• Test: CI/CD pipelines automatically run unit tests, integration tests, and security scans. Testing is often done in sandbox environments to simulate production conditions and reduce risk. Testing in sandbox reduces exception handling, QA misses and integration incompatibilities, hence giving confidence in the success of the final product. While you are testing your apps, you can use automation testing tools like Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, and SonarQube.
• Deploy. Once the code passes QA, it’s deployed using continuous delivery software. Teams can opt for blue-green or canary deployments to minimize disruptions. Modern DevOps software allows for zero-downtime deployments with rollback capabilities. The deployment production can be automated and monitored with tools like CircleCI, CloudBees, GitLab CI/CD or Spinnaker.
• Observe. Post-deployment, the focus shifts to performance monitoring and incident management. Observability platforms track app uptime, resource usage, and user behavior, hereby alerting teams to anomalies before users do. To monitor the performance, many solutions offer QA mitigation and testing. Some of them are Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, and Splunk.
• Feedback: The feedback stage closes the loop by turning real-world usage—user data, logs, and bug reports—into actionable insights. This continuous feedback cycle drives improvement across planning, testing, and deployment, reinforcing DevOps' core principle of adaptive, data-driven delivery.

Together, these stages power the core outcomes DevOps is known for—faster delivery, better reliability, higher scalability, and built-in security—making teams more adaptive and efficient.

What is DevSecOps and how does it secure DevOps?

DevSecOps ensures that security doesn't fall behind in the DevOps process. It blends "security" into every phase of the DevOps pipeline, shifting the responsibility from a final checkpoint to a shared, ongoing practice.

Instead of waiting until development to run security checks, teams using DevSecOps integrate them early, during code writing, building, testing and even deployment. This "shift-left" approach helps catch vulnerabilities sooner, reduces technical debt and creates even more resilient and robust software stack.

What does DevSecOps look like in action?

DevSecOps empowers teams to release software faster without trading off trust. It is especially valuable in regulated industries, where compliance is vital. It is also a trademark for companies managing cloud native applications in the following ways.

• Secure Coding from Day One: Developers use secure frameworks, linters, and static code analysis tools (SAST) while writing code.
• Automated Security Testing: Pipelines run real-time checks for vulnerabilities (DAST), dependency risks, and misconfigurations.
• Policy as Code: Teams embed security rules directly into infrastructure using IaC, ensuring compliance at scale.
• Collaborative Remediation: Security isn’t siloed, engineers, ops, and infosec teams work together to prioritize and fix issues early.

DevOps vs. Agile vs. Scrum vs. CI/CD: explained simply

If you ever felt confused with terms like agile, scrum, DevOps, and CI/CD, you are not alone. 

These concepts often overlap but serve different purposes in the software delivery ecosystem. Understanding how they work together (and where they don't) can help teams streamline processes, reduce friction, and improve outcomes.

In plain language, Agile sets the development pace, Scrum puts Agile into practice, DevOps extends DevOps to production, and CI/CD delivers on DevOps automation processes. 

What are the top benefits of using DevOps in software development?

All collaborative work environments come with challenges, but almost all DevOps teams agree that working under this process has a positive effect on their organization.

Here are some of the significant benefits that DevOps teams achieve, all of which lead to better quality applications, energized teams, and happier customers.

• Enhanced speed: DevOps accelerates the entire software development process through workflow automation and collaboration. Rapid delivery allows teams to ship new features faster and move quickly to the next project, keeping users engaged and satisfied.
• Improved reliability: Continuous integration, automated testing, and shared oversight make it easier to catch and fix issues early, resulting in stable, production-ready releases that perform consistent.
• Scalability: DevOps workflows make it easier to grow and evolve products. By automating routine tasks and standardizing environments, teams can handle complex infrastructure and feature growth with minimal disruption.
• Increased security: Security is embedded throughout the DevOps pipeline—not bolted on at the end. Automation and compliance checks ensure safer code, reduce backtracking, and keep applications aligned with regulatory standards.
  

What are the challenges of DevOps, and how can they be solved?

Even teams that embrace DevOps often encounter friction points. The key to long-term success isn't avoiding challenges; it's identifying and addressing them with the right strategies.

• Cultural resistance: Cultural resistance is a DevOps blocker that occurs when development and operations teams have historically operated in silos. Devs may prioritize speed, while ops focuses on stability, leading to friction. To bridge this gap, leadership must champion a culture of shared accountability. That means aligning incentives, investing in cross-functional training, and encouraging collaboration from sprint through post-deployment reviews.
• Tooling and integration complexity: DevOps thrives on automation, but too many disconnected tools can lead to more problems than they solve. Teams often suffer from tool sprawl, where overlapping capabilities and poor integration lead to inefficiency, miscommunication, and maintenance headaches. Solving this starts with evaluating the stack based on compatibility, scalability, and ease of use. 
• Inconsistent environments: Sometimes, dev teams run into a major cause of "but it worked on my machine" errors across development, testing, and production. These bug discrepancies are hard to trace and resolve, slowing release cycles and frustrating teams. Infrastructure as a code (IaC), containerization, and policy as code offer reliable solutions. By standardizing environment configurations and automated provisioning, teams can ensure consistency, reduce errors, and speed up troubleshooting. 
• Skills gap: Adopting DevOps often demands skills that cut across development, operations, and sometimes even security. Not every team member is naturally equipped for a hybrid mindset. To close the gap, organizations should provide ongoing education through hands-on labs, certifications, and mentorship programs. 
• Metrics blindspots: DevOps success depends on data, but many other teams either don't track the right metrics or are overwhelmed with vanity metrics that don't drive decisions. Without clear visibility, it is hard to improve performance, detect bottlenecks, or justify investments. The solution is to adopt well-defined, outcome-oriented KPIs, like DORA metrics (deployment, frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery and change failure rate.)

While DevOps teams need proper human intervention and frequent container monitoring to improve app utility in production, they also require substantial network infrastructure to detect and repair fault isolations and interface crashes, centralizing the backend operations and aiding in continuous production. 

What are the top continuous delivery tools for DevOps teams?

Automated processes are an essential part of successful DevOps. Teams can use continuous delivery software to release products to the market quickly and efficiently.

To be included in the continuous delivery software category, platforms must:

• Connect to code repositories 
• Generate a software build 
• Help teams define and execute their processes from coding to staging 
• Automatically deploy code or maintain code in a deployment-ready state

Below are the top five leading continuous delivery software solutions from G2’s Spring 2025 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.

1. GitHub

GitHub is a powerful development and project management tool that enables you to pull requests, repurpose coding scripts, save and store software projects, and collaborate in a multifaceted DevOps environment to optimize and automate CI/CD pipelines and push your stack to a live environment without glitches or bugs. 

Trusted by millions, it streamlines code sharing, issue tracking, version control, and CI/CD integration, helping teams build and deploy software efficiently and securely.

What users like best:

"GitHub has great collaboration features that allow our development team to work on the same project together. From code reviews and discussions, it dramatically streamlines our ability to push great code to our customers. It also offers excellent version control through Git, keeping our team updated on code changes. It's easy to start with their free hosting, so it's a no-brainer for students wanting to learn to code."

- GitHub Review, Kyle J.

What users dislike:

"With the easy access of Azure git within the Microsoft's azure environment, the GitHub has lost the charm though being a great git management tool."

- GitHub Review, Mohit K.

2. Salesforce Platform

Salesforce Platform is a unified ERP and software development kit (SDK) that helps you run your business workflows, control and host integrations for cloud native application and optimize your application development and testing operations all in a centralized environment.

It also enables you to get a harmonized view of your customer databases, automate coding with low-code/no-code editors and optimize your releases with increased efficiency and quality.

What users like best:

"Salesforce offers unmatched customization through its AppExchange, workflows, and automation tools. It's incredibly flexible and integrates well with external systems via APIs. The reporting and dashboard tools are also strong, enabling detailed performance tracking across teams."

- Salesforce Platform Review, Nabi R. 

What users dislike:

"As a user, what I don't like about Salesforce is that it is very expensive, especially for small businesses and startups, and as a developer, when you are dealing with a large amount of data, so the reports and dashboards can run slowly, and sometimes the governor limit can restrict the complex operation.

- Salesform Platform Review, Dhruv G.

3. GitLab

GitLab offers an integrated development environment (IDE) to host, manage, monitor, plan, maintain, control and launch software projects with automated testing and DevOps processes.

 With automated dashboards and CI/CD support, you can collaborate in a live environment, run compilation and execution, pull container registries,  and deploy various agile techniques to shorten your time to deployment without extra network requirements or developer bandwidth.

What users like best:

"What I like most is that GitLab brings together version control, CI/CD, issue tracking, and project management in a single tool. I really like how seamless it is to go from writing code to deploying it, all without leaving the platform. The built-in CI/CD is easy to set up, and the merge request workflow helps keep code quality high."

- GitLab Review, Mohit V.

What users dislike:

"Managing Gitlab runner infrastructure (especially for autoscaling or hybrid cloud environments) can be complex and will need close monitoring and resource Altering."

- GitLab Review, Sampath K.

4. LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly is an AI-development and a feature management platform that helps plan, schedule and push releases in a timely manner. It allows teams to release risk, accelerate delivery and optimize feature rollouts through real-time feature flags.

It also offers advanced DevOps features like A/B testing, progressive rollouts, monitoring, and seamless CI/CD integration to optimize the quality and QA controls of your entire software development lifecycle process. 

What users like best:

"LaunchDarkly has allowed us to deploy code into production on a regular basis and then enable release on demand to different segments of our customers (or all of them) on our schedule and not when the code is deployed. If something is wrong, instead of spending costly time rolling things back we can simply turn off the feature flag and hide the error from our customers and then fix it behind the scenes. This allow allows us to test it in production without impacting production. Highly recommend taking the steps needed to enable feature flags in your code and then utlizing LaunchDarkly to quickly manage who can see what in your applications."

- LaunchDarkly Review, Dwight S.

What users dislike:

"It’s not easy to define custom metrics, especially when the denominator isn’t a simple user count. For example, setting up ratio-based metrics tied to events or domain-specific units (like entries or sessions) takes extra work and isn’t well-documented."

- LaunchDarkly Review, Vincent L.

5. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers functionality for building, managing, controlling and securing cloud integrations.

A part of RedHat's primary enterprise automation offering, it automates ETL and data handling workflows and helps in continous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) operations to regularize the software development lifecycle and make your product more efficient and user friendly.

What users like best:

"AAP makes my life easier because I am a lazy engineer! If there is ever a configuration task that I have to do more than once, I use AAP to get it done. Even if I may only do something once, chances are there is a playbook for it, just incase I ever have to do it again."

- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Dave K.

What users dislike:

"Cost is definitely a thing that can be off putting with moving towards the GUI offering (as well as other associated features that come with it)."

- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Carson M.

Test, assemble, push, and launch

Working under a DevOps process encourages and fosters a collective spirit within development teams, which leads to incredible outcomes and improves the quality of the software stack. When multiple teams take up a share in the software development lifecycles, employ robust agile, scrum and CI/CD workflows, and streamline testing, it caters to faster production, delivery, and quality of software applications and makes them fit for customer deployment. 

By introducing DevOps software within your development teams, you can not only help them optimize their bandwidth, but also automate processes like API management or versioning and testing to push upgrades and invest in a reliable and secure goal.

Build applications faster with low-code development platforms designed to get your software to market as quickly as possible.

This article was originally published in 2024. It has been updated with new information.