How To Unify Agile And DevOps

Introduction

Unifying Agile and DevOps is an important part of creating an effective development workflow. In this blog post, we will discuss what DevOps and Agile are, and how to implement them to create a unified development workflow.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps is an approach to software development that emphasizes collaboration, communication, and integration between software development and operations teams. The goal of DevOps is to create a streamlined process for developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring applications and services. DevOps has a strong focus on automating the delivery of value to the customer.

What Is Agile? 

Agile is an iterative approach to software development that emphasizes continuous improvement and collaboration between cross-functional teams. Agile teams focus on delivering value quickly and continuously, while always learning and adapting to changes.

How DevOps And Agile Complement Each Other

To illustrate how DevOps and Agile work together, consider this example:

A developer creates a description of what their software needs to run, what kind of operating system it needs, what components it uses, what frameworks it relies on, etc. Now the developer completes a bit of code and needs to test it. The code is checked into the source code control system. An automated process created by the organization’s DevOps team would automatically begin.

The process then creates that environment and deploys the new software into that environment and starts the automated unit test. If the unit test passed, the software is deemed acceptable and is ready for deployment. If the unit test fails, the developer is notified and reprograms the software. Also, the deployment can also be automated. This entire process is referred to as a pipeline. You might hear terms like continuous deployment or continuous integration (CD/CI) pipeline.

Once a team has completed a sprint, it has gone through things like automated unit testing and continuous delivery to automatically push out the update and the result is you have a new product or a new version of the product.

Agile produces small improvements to a product in a continuous series of short sprints and DevOps helps developers automate the testing of their code, and when the tests pass, DevOps can also automate the pain-free deployment.

Benefits Of Agile And DevOps

Any product development that can benefit from smaller, more rapid, more frequent release cycles can use Agile and DevOps. And once companies started seeing the value in “A”gile, they wanted to be “a”gile in other aspects of the business. Adopting Agile practices and leveraging Agile principles in other areas is called enterprise Agile and leads to business agility. Agile can easily be adaptable to other business areas because it is a set of values and principles and that agility has value across the entire organization.

The Agile mindset has helped organizations become more adaptive instead of making massive, expensive multi-year investments and then pivoting to react to the market. Companies now choose to continually test ideas and features allowing them to react more quickly to success.

Implementing Agile And DevOps

In order to unify Agile and DevOps, teams need to focus on integrating their development and operations processes. This includes automating processes, breaking down silos, and creating a culture of collaboration and communication. It also involves establishing an effective continuous delivery process, which includes agile development, continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment.

Agile and DevOps are a set of principles and values that encourage a new mindset. There is no one correct way to do/use them. Frameworks like Scrum and Extreme Programming bring specific approaches and practices to the project, but they are still agile because they support the values and principles. Agile and DevOps bring a synergistic way of working to an organization. Most organizations start by shifting a small number of projects to agile and DevOps. Thus gaining experience and evolving their practices and processes as they learn.

Conclusion

In summary, Agile and DevOps are designed to help companies create, evolve and deploy more quickly and efficiently. They have been changing how we think about product development for years. And now we are seeing more and more organizations start to explore their benefits. As consumer needs keep evolving, Agile organizations will be ready to respond quickly and bring more value to their customers.