There’s lots of confusion about what DevOps is. This has resulted in the emergence of DevOps “antipatterns”—DevOps patterns of behavior that will not result in success. There are often clear signs that what you are doing isn’t going to work. This article delves into some of them in hopes you can avoid these mistakes and successfully implement DevOps principles and practices.

Release management is still critical in a DevOps environment. You likely will just have to change your current process. You will no longer need to track implementation or back-out plans as part of change orders; you just need to be able to track the application, its components, and its promotion schedule. The key to maintaining these change orders is automation.

Software development has been moving toward progressively smaller and faster development cycles, and continuous integration and continuous deployment are compressing delivery times even further. But is this actually good for businesses or their users? Just because you can deploy to production quickly and frequently, should you?

Many people equate 100 percent unit test coverage with high code quality, but that is not enough. Code coverage tools only measure whether the tests execute the code; they make no judgment on the effectiveness of the tests. Testers should review unit tests, even if they have high coverage levels, and either help improve the tests or supplement them with extra tests where necessary.