By Dick Stark

What do most new Atlassian RightStar customers have in common? Answer: Atlassian Advisory Services. Anyone on RightStar Atlassian team can perform this assessment. Here’s what they do.

RightStar offers DevOps solutions to assist companies to drive down costs, enhance the customer experience and improve operational processes. Our objective is to assist organizations to move quickly towards a more DevOps centered IT culture. DevOps organizations experience increased competitive advantages, enabling faster time to market, increased customer satisfaction, and employee productivity.  Why?  Because technology has become the dominate value creation process and an increasingly important means of customer satisfaction.

Many large organizations have implemented a wide variety of DevOps processes and tools from organizations such as IBM, Microsoft, HP, and Atlassian. Although DevOps standards are not yet as mature as ITSM’s ITIL framework, DevOps domain capabilities center around the following:

• Test Management
• Requirements Management
• Application Performance Management
• Build Management
• Project Management
• Defect and Issue Management
• Change and Configuration Management
• IT Governance

RightStar provides DevOps advisory services focused on four primary areas within IT: culture, organization, processes and tools. Since there are no prescribed DevOps patterns and practices, implementations vary.  Although there is currently a move towards DevOps standardization, RightStar relies on its experience with other organizations and previous best practice experience.

Additionally, RightStar advisory services for a DevOps rollout is based upon the following phases of the software development lifecycle.

• Plan. Requirements, resource management, capacity planning and assigning levels of effort based on either Story points or hours to complete a task
• Build. Staging the code in an automated way, have automated peer reviews for good coding practices, collaborating with the teams to deliver information accurately and efficiently.
• Continuous Integration. Defined branching and merging, automated testing based on defined branches, and traceability
• Deployment. Use an automation tool or tools to help with deployment
• Operate. Server monitoring and application performance monitoring should be automated
• Continuous Feedback. Better products through user feedback

Surveys show that customers that begin with up-front advisory services have a much better overall implementation experience, which reinforces the importance of this RightStar consulting offering.