What if automation and efficiency not only influenced an organization’s workflows but kept them secure and reliable too?
At a high-level, this is what DevOps can do for organizations. To dig a little deeper, DevOps combines software development and operations with the goal of shortening the systems development life cycle and providing continuous delivery with high software quality.
In short, organizations with DevOps teams tend to see an increase in the overall productivity of the software development process.
Meet Firefly
Spectrum’s Firefly team is a group of energetic and collaborative individuals who are experienced in design, implementation, and delivery of a secure and repeatable DevOps platform solution.
“Imagine a world where Product Owners, Development, Quality Assurance, IT Operations, and Information Security work together, not only to help each other, but also to ensure that the overall organization succeeds. By working toward a common goal, they enable the fast flow of planned work into production, while achieving world-class stability, reliability, availability, and security."
Exploring the Possibilities of DevOps
At Spectrum, our Firefly team is designing, developing, testing, and launching one of the first fully automated DevOps Solutions as a Service to replace legacy solutions.
“Adopting the DevOps framework can really change an organization’s culture,” said Margaret U., Director of Strategic Enablement Services. “With it, there’s the ability to thoughtfully break down silos and provide a technical solution that removes burdens around how software is delivered.”
The Firefly team uses the DevOps framework in tandem with agile software delivery. Agile is an iterative approach to delivering iterative feature work throughout the product life cycle. Iterations within an Agile environment can also be referred to as sprints.
During a recent sprint, the team focused on continuous quality and security by exploring the integration of SonarQube and Twistlock into their Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. A CI/CD pipeline builds code, runs tests (CI), and safely deploys a new version of the application (CD). For further context, SonarQube assists developers in writing safer and cleaner code while Twistlock is a system for container security (think Docker or Kubernetes).
This will enable features that perform static code analysis (which is the automated analysis of source code without executing the application) while pinpointing possible security vulnerabilities during development lifecycles, prior to the delivery to Operations.
Simply put, the integrations of SonarQube and Twistlock into the CI/CD pipeline would help development teams create higher-quality code as well as mitigate security vulnerabilities during development lifecycles.
The Team Dynamic
The bonds between the Firefly team members are very strong.
Having a strong team dynamic enables the members of Firefly to operate at high rate of productivity and scope, despite being a relatively new team at Spectrum.
“We always try to deliver our best,” said Adrienne M., Quality Enablement Engineer. “We never scrape the surface in our work. We dig as deep as we can so we are providing the best solution.”
While the Firefly team currently impacts several areas of Spectrum, their long term vision is to expand their support to even more parts of the organization.
