Looking back all the way to 2017, statistics showed that a majority of the US venture-backed startups failed, with only a minimal success rate of only 2.5%!
Let that sink in for a second…
Allow us to assume your company isn’t already funded and backed by a management board (in which case these ideas are not even a considerable suggestion, but an urgent must), and as such you don’t have the luxury of wasting… Anything.
If in the process of developing your product, you manually did one or more of:
- Tests Triggering
- Code building
- Container building / publishing
- Recurring dependency installation
- Recurring environment creations and configurations
- Reporting to the team on a new release / build / tests runs
- Application deployment
- Or Any other recurring work
You are wasting your time, Literally!
It doesn’t matter whether you are a team of one developer or even managing a remote entity to develop the product, certain decisions are required from day one of work. It’s not trivial, but it is very much essential to the productivity of your team, and for the chances of breaking out and making your product rise above others.
Take a breath
Take a week worth of your R&D team work, even if it consists of a single developer, and invest it in building and setting up tools for automation, delivery pipeline and monitoring. Yes, “Continuous Integration” is not a scary buzzword, you don’t need to hire experts or pay tons of $$, you can do it in a single afternoon. If you decide to put a day into it, you’ll even get the benefits of a system that will suffice for a few good years to come, scout’s honor.
Deliver
Got your CI server ready to run? Great, take some time and build your delivery pipeline: plan builds, tests and deployments, so that your application would automatically flow through each of these steps independently with every push or merge request.
Test
Do TDD! This cannot be stressed enough, investing in a good testing suite and letting it lead the way, would not only save time and energy, but also future frustration and all-nighters of debugging. This goes hand in hand with your already-designed pipeline of building, testing, reporting and deploying. Where a product is throughly tested, automation thrives (and as a side-effect, developers too 😉).
We’d highly recommend that you try Insta CI, as this is an extremely scalable solution that can grow and fit in with your broader tech stack.
Log
Design your application to produce meaningful logs.
Anyone who has adopted Insta as their stand alone CI, or have brought Insta in to be extended on top of their existing CI would already have this component checked!
Analyze
Log analysis can wait, but make sure you understand what’s at stake before deciding whether you allocate the resources in the scope of this week.
Monitor
Know what your application is going through at all times. Measure as much relevant metrics as possible to be able to debug, respond and improve quickly and in short cycles. Knowing how your application behaves is crucial; you need to be aware of CPU intensity, memory consumption and leaks, as well as latency of requests and levels+nature of errors.
Alert
Based on your already-collected metrics, set alerts to points where certain thresholds are crossed and notify yourself / your dev team. Knowing exactly when something goes wrong, doesn’t only save you in production. Even if you’re still developing your product, you’ll be able to catch errors as they happen, ease the process of debugging and history searching and keep improving in short cycles of feedback.
Communicate
At the end of the day, “DevOps” is all about communication. Being able to deliver ideas, break silos, collaborate and reach common grounds are all the building blocks for making dev and ops work together.
Building communication between teams is not an easy task. Hell, even between two people you can sometimes get lost.
Plan and collaborate on one central place. Use a product like Insta to manage all previous commits, edits, metrics and overall timeline and progress.
Wrapping things up
With a week of work you can achieve all of the above, and even more with some motivation. Although they seem somewhat distant and irrelevant to your product’s phase, these set of tools and platforms will not only boost your development speed, it will make your entire process fluent, responsive and fun to work with. It would save tons of hours of recurring work, debugging and searching. You’ll become proactive and on top of the system instead of the other way around.
Planning to grow? On-boarding of a new engineer takes a lot of unproductive time and can result in receding performance and context. Automated systems like Insta would take half the time to explain and on-board, while preventing expected mistakes. Good luck and happy testing!