Several DevOps practices can help speed up software development and deployment:

1. Agile project management – Using an agile approach with shorter sprints and frequent iterations allows teams to deliver working software more quickly. Bugs can be fixed in subsequent sprints.
2. Continuous integration and delivery – By automating the integration and testing of code changes, teams can catch bugs early and deploy new features more frequently. This reduces the time from writing code to releasing a new version.
3. Automation – Automating repetitive tasks like building, testing, and deploying code frees up developer time and ensures consistency. Automation reduces the time it takes to deploy new changes.
4. Infrastructure as code – Defining infrastructure in code allows it to be version controlled, tested, and deployed automatically. This speeds up the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure.
5. Monitoring and observability – Monitoring the development pipeline and applications helps identify issues early. Teams can then fix problems faster before they impact customers.
6. Gathering continuous feedback – Getting feedback from testing, staging environments, and production helps teams iterate quickly and fix bugs as soon as possible.
7. Cross-team collaboration – When development and operations teams work closely together, handoffs become seamless and issues can be resolved faster. This shortens the time from coding to production.

In summary, DevOps practices like Agile, CI/CD, automation, and infrastructure as code help accelerate the development process. Monitoring, feedback loops, and cross-team collaboration then help teams identify and fix issues quickly. The end result is faster deployment times and more reliable software releases.

Sources

1. https://www.atlassian.com/devops/what-is-devops/devops-best-practices
2. https://appinventiv.com/blog/how-devops-accelerate-software-development-process/
3. https://www.developers.dev/tech-talk/technology/implementing-devops-strategies-to-accelerate-del