Agile and DevOps

Agile And DevOps: The Combined Power To Enhance Your Software Delivery Capabilities

You already know how important it is to implement agile methodologies for software development from the previous articles. But an organization is not just about the delivery. There are hundreds of minor and significant processes involved in running an organization. And Agile and DevOps, when combined, help organizations achieve the optimum balance between these two workstreams. 

These IT (information technology) operations include service desk, request fulfillment, service strategy, facility management, asset management, infrastructure management, network management, and systems management. In addition, the list includes deployment, configuration, security, backup and recovery, database management, performance monitoring, risk management, and testing.

To run an organization smoothly, both agile and you must combine DevOps practices. Read along to learn about DevOps and how to integrate it with agile.

What is an accurate description of agile and DevOps?

As you already know, Agile is a project management framework that involves iterative processes to discover requirements and develop solutions through collaboration between self-organizing and cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, and flexible responses to change. 

DevOps is short for development (Dev) and operations (Ops). It is a set of practices, cultural philosophies, and tools to provide continuous software delivery with high quality. 

Computer science researchers Len Bass, Ingo Weber, and Liming Zhu defined DevOps as;

a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production while ensuring high quality.”

Can agile and DevOps coexist?

The simple answer is Yes. Many DevOps practices like automated build and test, continuous integration, continuous delivery originated from the agile software development practices. While agile methodology focuses more on software development, DevOps focuses on the software’s testing and delivery. Since both agile framework and DevOps have several common principles and the fact that they are helpful at different stages of the software development life cycle, it is evident that they can coexist. It even happens to be one of the best practices.

DevOps mixes agile principles along with automation and continuous delivery principles. The main aim of DevOps initiatives is to deliver software solutions on time. Agile methodology focuses on software development by changing and updating the products as per customer feedback. While DevOps focuses on deploying these products by automated processes and bug detection at early stages. DevOps fosters the collaboration between the software development and IT operations teams irrespective of whichever software development methodologies methodology the software development team has used – agile practices or not.

What are the common misconceptions about agile and DevOps?

  • One of the most common misconceptions about agile and DevOps is that DevOps replaces agile. As you already know, it’s not. Instead, DevOps is an extension of agile. 
  • Another belief is that DevOps requires agile development. However, even though DevOps shares many practices with agile, it is independently applied during the software deployment stage. And you can use DevOps irrespective of the methods used during the development – waterfall or agile.
  • Many mistake DevOps to be software. It’s not. DevOps, like agile, is a methodology or strategy consisting of communication, collaboration, and automation of development and operations.
  • Some believe that DevOps to be better than agile for the delivery of software. It’s not. Both frameworks are designed to help organizations and work in their way. They are complementary to each other and not contradictory. 
  • Another misconception about DevOps is that it matters only to development and operations. Even though the name originated from these two terms, DevOps is not confined to development and operations. This methodology can empower an entire organization as everyone involved in the delivery has a stake in it.

What are the benefits of using agile and DevOps?

DevOps culture emphasizes service delivery and how the systems interact. Therefore, your development team needs to consider these a top priority as it is of a great value to the customers and clients. Hence, using DevOps with agile has many benefits.

  • With DevOps and agile methods combined, your team can innovate faster and adapt to the changing markets. As a result, you can increase the frequency and speed of your releases. The faster your new features are released, the faster you can quickly respond to your customers’ demands and alterations.
  • Practices like automation, continuous delivery, continuous integration help you to manage the complex systems, infrastructure, and development process. You can even stay updated on real-time performance with practices like monitoring and logging.
  • There is improved collaboration between your developers and operations teams as they share their responsibilities, ownership, and accountabilities. As a result, they combine their workflows and save time.
  • With automation and configuration management systems, there is greater security with DevOps and agile. It becomes easier to preserve compliance and retain fine-grained controls.
  • Shorter release cycles with quality software give your customer a positive experience. In addition, with automation, you can ensure software stability after each update and new release.

What are the most efficient ways to do DevOps in an agile team?

By now, you clearly understand that implementing DevOps and agile in your software development life cycle has several benefits. But the question arises of how exactly to achieve this. Below are some essential principles that you must inculcate to enhance your software delivery.

Automate

Some of your processes might still be manual, like testing, deployment, and handoffs. Automate everything you can – testing, integration, unit, acceptance, workflow, code scanning processes, and releases. Automation reduces the need for manual checking of issues and ensures faster fixing of bugs.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Both DevOps and agile emphasize continuous integration. This principle involves putting the source code together, building, integrating, and creating a deployable product. Automate such manual processes. After that, every time there is a source code commit, security scans and static code analysis are run to help developers work out the merge conflicts.

Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment (CD)

Another critical aspect of both DevOps and agile is continuous delivery. Continuous delivery involves producing software in short cycles, ready to be released at any time. Automate this process such that it automatically takes the input from continuous integration, combines with necessary modules, builds, tests, and facilitates frequent releases.

Improve teamwork flow

For any software to work, everyone involved must have a proper understanding of all development aspects. Members like product owner, scrum master, developers, programmers, manager, operations team, system admins – everyone should consider the product’s development and deployment. Ensure that your team is well-equipped with the required tools, resources, knowledge, and training about the releases, services, maintenance, and deployment. 

Find and eliminate bottlenecks.

Bottlenecks (also known as “hot spots”) are sections of the code that execute most frequently. Because of their high execution count, bottlenecks tend to slow down your product’s performance. Implement instrumentation to find these hold-ups and automate and fix them.

Adopt DevOps in sprints

Agile divides the software development process into sprints. Sprint refers to a predefined time in which a team will work to accomplish specific goals. With sprints, Agile adopts an iterative approach for product development or delivery. While combining DevOps with agile, it is strategic to adopt DevOps into your sprints. To do that, invite operations and support personnel to planning sessions, daily meetings, sprint reviews, and scrum. The operations team can help the developers plan an accurate release schedule and faster product shipping with such collaboration.

Include QA in each phase

Quality Assurance (QA) is a process that ensures the quality of your software products or services. It improves the software development process to bring it up to the quality standards defined for software products. Since both DevOps and agile involve processes like continuous integration and delivery, including QA testing in each phase of the entire software development cycle, it becomes vital.

How did DevOps enable agile organizations?

Many organizations had implemented an agile approach for software development. With continuous integration practices, there were several modules for frequent testing and release. Practitioners developed the DevOps approach to automate and streamline other life cycle processes related to software development and operations. Here are some of the critical after-effects of introducing DevOps in organizations:

  • With the introduction of DevOps, organizations set up a self-sustaining software development framework that provided continuous feedback.
  • By implementing automation with continuous integration and continuous delivery, teams could reduce the overall time to develop and deliver software.
  • DevOps ensured that teams had the feedback across the software lifecycle from development, testing, and deployment. 
  • Teams could establish transparency and trail all software releases, patches, updates, and deployment with DevOps.
  • It became more manageable for the teams to track issues and incidents with the help of monitoring tools.

Conclusion

The agile approach focuses more on software development, and DevOps focuses on testing and delivering software. When used together, the combined power enhances your software delivery capabilities. When combined, there is an increased speed in releases, improved collaboration between developers and operations teams, greater security, customer satisfaction, software stability, and more advantages. 

But to find success while implementing DevOps in an agile team, remember these key points:

  • Automate 
  • Continuous Integration (CI)
  • Continuous Delivery (CD)
  • Improve teamwork flow
  • Find and eliminate bottlenecks
  • Adopt DevOps in sprints
  • Include QA in each phase

To summarize, DevOps is a combination of agile and continuous integration practices. It’s an approach to building and operating software systems that emphasize collaboration among developers, operations staff, and users.  

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