DevSecOps is an important software development approach that conditions teams to align processes, promote collaboration and continuously invite and act upon feedback. In this vein, DevSecOps enables innovation in ways many of us don’t even realize.

Specifically, DevSecOps drives mission capabilities and performance, promotes safety and resilience, and improves the quality of the end user experience.

In federal government environments in particular, DevSecOps is one way GDIT is accelerating value delivery of solutions to customers faster than ever before.

1. Drive mission capabilities and performance

DevSecOps enables teams to develop capabilities and features more frequently, with better quality and with more efficiency. It enables key considerations like the diversity of teams and stakeholders, contract requirements, program context, and dynamic policy environments. One example of this is the evolving cybersecurity policy landscape following last year’s Cyber Executive Order and the implementation of its recommendations.

DevSecOps promotes the more efficient and effective delivery of solutions and innovations to meet the mission. Together with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), DevSecOps encourages critical practices like platform operations, product focused development, modern team topologies, agility, minimum viable products (MVPs), canary deployments, feature flags, test automation and more.

Taken together, this integrated approach to development drives better performance and widens the aperture of a program’s or an application’s capabilities as well.

2. Improve safety, security, and resilience

Another important benefit of DevSecOps is that it establishes guardrails that define and enforce standards and policy. This means developers can turn more of their focus to mission capabilities and the development of mission-grade applications. DevSecOps also increases throughput and change reliability and speed. The deployment of added capabilities and enhancements contributes to greater trust, safety, and security.

DevSecOps positions teams to better addresses life-safety critical systems, resilience scalability and performance, cyberthreats, operational needs, and visibility. It promotes practices such as full lifecycle security, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, infrastructure and configuration as code and more.

It results in a smaller software footprint that is easier to deploy and maintain. A DevSecOps approach also supports the creation of software bills of materials (SBOMs), binary and container repositories, policy as code and enhanced monitoring and observability – all things that are essential to a sound and resilient program or application, and conserve critical development resources for innovation in other areas.

3. Enhance the end user experience

Without question, DevSecOps enables rapid improvement to the end user experience and overall performance. This is through the accelerated delivery of new and improved capabilities, an intentional focus on the quality of the user experience and increases in productivity and efficiency.

It supports a focus on considering all system users and the ways they interact with a system – from end users to the developers, stakeholders, and customer personas. DevSecOps can help teams address things like user awareness, buy-in and adoption – especially with complex and diverse stakeholder environments.

When teams incorporate DevSecOps, they build more relevant, more performant mission applications faster. These applications and practices are safer and more resilient. They also result in better performance, improved quality and tailored customer and user experience.

This is where the value in the “speed to value” equation comes into play. Our expertise, technology and processes enable us to support the mission; using approaches like DevSecOps enable us to do it faster and in a way that generates true value for our customers. And this is where we start to truly bring “the art of the possible” to our customers and their missions.