IT leaders may realize that the performance of development, security, and operations teams affects how quickly the organization can produce new software. However, leaders also need to be aware that team performance is integral to how the overall business can take on competitors and ride out changes in a turbulent market. High-performing DevSecOps teams are directly tied to creating a stronger business. And IT leaders — from managers to directors and executives — play a critical role in exactly how effectively and efficiently those teams function and are able to bolster the company’s brand, customer loyalty, partner relationships, and ultimately the bottom line.
“It’s not just up to team members to make sure they’re running at top performance, creating software efficiently, at speed, and securely. IT leaders have a shared responsibility in ensuring their teams have a strong vision, resources, and a culture of learning, collaboration, and development. It would be difficult for any team to be successful without strong leadership.”
–Fatima Sarah Khalid, developer evangelist at GitLab
If your organization already has an AI-powered DevSecOps platform, that’s a great start because it eliminates the complexity, mounting costs, and security risks that go along with a toolchain. But there’s a chasm of difference between elite teams and everyone else, affecting how resilient, secure, and reliable your team is able to be.
If teams are falling somewhere below a top performance level, they’re not taking full advantage of all the features and processes that could be powering your software development lifecycle.
Why performance matters to your business
High performance translates to higher deployment frequency, faster time to market, improved security practices, and better quality — all of which directly correlate to cost savings and the company’s ability to quickly pivot to meet volatile and changing markets. And creating secure software means protecting the company’s data and brand, avoiding embarrassing headlines, and ensuring customer and partner trust isn’t lost. Being more efficient and having teams develop and deploy faster and more securely means the business can respond to whatever comes at it. Also, delivering a lot of value to customers means increasing brand loyalty since users won’t be so easily enticed to switch to one of your competitors who beat you to the market with a tempting new feature.
Do you have high performers?
So how well are your DevSecOps teams operating? Here are several questions you can ask yourself as you think about team performance:
- How quickly and efficiently are your teams deploying software?
- Are your teams using automation for compliance, security, or continuous integration and delivery?
- Is the software development process slower, or not as smooth, as it used to be?
- Are security issues consistently, or increasingly, popping up in your software?
- Does the security team know what development teams are working on?
- Does pushing new features into production often cause issues or slowdowns?
- Are team members showing signs of burnout?
If teams are having trouble with any of these areas, they may need a little extra support.
Getting started
In this ebook, we’ll not only help you understand what helps DevSecOps teams become high performers, but how IT leaders can help them achieve that level of success. We’ll look at keeping software teams’ focus on users, the importance of collaboration between development and security, and combining the cloud with a flexible infrastructure.
Whether your DevSecOps teams are struggling to up their game or could simply add to what they’re already doing right, remember that becoming a highly successful team of DevSecOps professionals is an attainable goal.