Guideline For Development and Operation (DevOps)

Published 26/02/2023

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1. Introduction

Driven by the role of the Digital Government Authority (DGA) to enhance digital performance within government entities, raise the quality of services provided and improve the beneficiary's experience, in line with the strategic directions of the DGA, and in practice of the best international practices in all digital government-related areas, the DGA has prepared a "guideline for the development and operation approach (DevOps approach)" to increase the efficiency of digital services and products, by adopting a cooperative or joint approach to accomplish the tasks performed by the application development and IT operating teams in the government entity. The DevOps approach is the most advanced way to develop and maintain IT systems, combining end-to-end ownership of engineering and automation. Hence, this guideline is one of the references that will contribute to promoting the adoption and use of the DevOps approach in support of digital transformation activities in the government sector. In addition, this guideline is part of a series of guideline documents aimed at supporting and promoting digital excellence.

2. Guideline Objectives

This guideline aims to:

Encourage government entities to adopt DevOps approach , which in turn will:
- Enhancing communication and interaction between software developers and operators and project management experts.
- Reduce costs and improve productivity at a faster rate.
- Execute related processes more reliably and efficiently.
Understand the DevOps approach requirements for the effective implementation.
Learn the effective measurement of DevOps approach adoption.

3. Guideline Scope

The scope of DevOps approach guideline divided into 7 sections as follow:

DevOps approach background.
DevOps approach Purpose/Value.
DevOps approach cases.
DevOps approach phases.
DevOps approach requirements.
DevOps approach adoption.
DevOps approach sustainability & measurement.

4. Target Groups

This guideline targets experts, practitioners and technical personnel working in software/system development in government agencies.

5. Guideline Statement

for more information; Check the digital version.

6. Table of Definition

Term	Definition
Authority	Digital Government Authority
Government Entities	Ministries, authorities, public institutions, councils, national centres including any additional form of a public agency.
Digital Government	Promotes administrative, organizational and operational processes between the various government agencies in their transitioning to a comprehensive digital transformation to allow easy and effective access to government digital information and services.
DevOps	DevOps approach is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity; evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
Digital Transformation	Digitally and strategically transforming and developing business standards and models that would rely on data, technologies, and ICT.
Stakeholder	Parties and agencies that affect and are affected by decisions, directions, procedures, objectives, policies and initiatives of the digital government and share some of their interests and outputs and are affected by any change that occurs in them
CI/CD	CI/CD is a method to frequently deliver applications to customers by introducing automation into the stages of app development. The main concepts attributed to CI/CD are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.
Waterfall software development	The waterfall methodology is a project management approach that emphasizes a linear progression from beginning to end of a project. This methodology, often used by engineers, is front-loaded to rely on careful planning, detailed documentation, and consecutive execution.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)	A service-level agreement (SLA) sets the expectations between the service provider and the customer and describes the products or services to be delivered, the single point of contact for end-user problems, and the metrics by which the effectiveness of the process is monitored and approved.
Plan	Create a plan for how to develop the application/ the service and its further development
Create	Develop the actual code
Verify	Manage and ensure the quality of the delivered code and further end products
Package/ pre-prod	Make the product/ service ready to be deployed
Release	Ensure that code can be delivered to production
Configure	Configure the application and the underlying infrastructure components
Monitor	Monitor the underlying health of application and the hardware usage
Reporting Line	Disciplinary reporting line in an organization
Performance Appraisal process	Employee performance review process as part of HR performance management
Collaboration Platforms	Tools within the DevOps approach architecture to facilitate the collaboration between teams
PaaS Services	Services for providing certain platforms as e.g., pre-configured databases
Infrastructure Provisioning	Ensuring actual deployment of infrastructure as servers and network for required software services
Portfolio Planning	Process to plan IT investments and/or IT projects in an organization.
Servant Leadership	Servant leadership is a leadership approach built on the belief that the most effective leaders strive to serve others, rather than accrue power or take control. The aforementioned others can include customers, partners, fellow employees, and the community at large.
Agile Ceremonies	Agile ceremonies are meetings where a development team comes together to keep each other updated on their project’s details. At the same time, other Scrum ceremonies, such as the sprint retrospective, helps the scrum team look back on their work and find ways of improving for future sprints.
Functional Requirements	Those requirements would include an analysis of the core requirements described with specific use cases and key metrics that define their success and validate if the technology considered either meets or has limited or no use for the functional requirements defined. Additionally, critical functional requirements that need to be considered are the suitability of the ET’s architecture and alignment with the governmental agency’s current and envisioned architecture in the future.

Abbreviations	Description
CI	Continuous Integration
CD	Continuous Delivery
E2E	End-to-end
SRE	Site Reliability Engineering
DevOps	Development and operations combined
ISO	International Standards Organisation
IEEE	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
NPA	Net promoter score
SP	Story Point
CIO	Chief Information Officer

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Guideline For Development and Operation (DevOps)

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