In the modern technology era, the process of application development and deployment has become a critical part of enterprise services. DevOps, continuous delivery, agile, all these practices take the entire development and deployment process to a new level. But have you ever considered combining DevOps and Agile? Let’s check out the areas where this combination could help:
How do DevOps and Agile combination help?
The combination of DevOps and Agile benefits the business in the following ways:
- Streamlines the release process and increases product contributions
- Provides greater collaboration
- More power and fewer risks in each release
- Fewer errors and quick fixes
- Increased visibility
- Higher user satisfaction rate as the products is more qualitative
But how to bring these together? Businesses plan to build more with the technical advances that DevOps and agile have conferred but can hardly merge these and take appropriate decisions. In order to optimize product development methods, businesses focus on DevOps. As a result, the demand for DevOps witnessed a remarkable rise.
DevOps is designed to help companies achieve seamless and cutting-edge development. Using DevOps reduces the number of actions necessary to bring the software to life and get it on the market. This results in faster releases and smoother operations. The implementation of DevOps also helps with better scalability and deployment, along with monitoring and supporting the software even after the release. The only downside that comes with traditional DevOps is that it does not cover the constant testing and development brought by Agile.
Due to this, agile practices have been entirely focused on what we call the development aspects of software delivery, reducing the focus on the operational aspects of software delivery. Hence, combining both DevOps and Agile methodology seems to be the most efficient way for the software development lifecycle of any product.
The combination will allow for the optimization of the development lifecycle and support of the product, both incrementally. It helps in improving the imbalance and building a highly efficient product.
A DevOps and Agile integration checklist
To simplify the method of implementing DevOps into Agile product development, there are a few instances to keep an eye on. Paying attention to these might help make the process work faster and more efficiently.
Let us have a look at these instances:
Improve teamwork flow
Management of both DevOps structures and the Agile approach makes it essential for the team members to have appropriate knowledge of every phase in the development process. The merger of both these allows us to get a DevOps business advantage and the practicality of the Agile method.
Organizations can start focusing on delivery and maintenance and not only on software development methods. Team divisions such as the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and PM, along with employment, infrastructure, and system admin roles, must be made accordingly. They should have the information on release, service, and change in management, along with background provisioning, automation and accessories, and application deployment. By doing this, build-and-run product-centric companies can solve the puzzle of effective development-to-operations hand-off.
Determine the lifecycle
Successfully trying a DevOps implementation strategy with an Agile framework with an aim to continuous delivery means learning the product lifecycle. This increases flexibility, decreases costs as it reduces losses, and speeds up the time required to take it onto the market.
Now, the organizations shall start focusing more on the operational aspects of the whole lifecycle. It will be helpful if you begin implementing some of the DevOps practices right at the origin of your development method.
DevOps adoption in sprints
When focusing on adopting agile workflow, the software development method is divided into sprints. Hence, it is a good idea to combine DevOps at the stage of managing sprints.
Here are a few directions you can follow during the beginning of running the DevOps way into your sprints:
- Invite ops/infrastructure/support staff to plan
- Discuss result functionality and operability points
- Include them in the future race
- Involve the DevOps organization in sprint reserve planning and regular meeting, as well as sprint report and scrum and plan adjustment
The duty and collaboration of your development team and operations duo are to keep track of the ops teams’ level of perfection in development. The ops team can then help the dev team in preparing the release program with greater efficiency and can support the dev team in making faster releases.
Including QA in every stage
Having QA as an essential part of the whole development lifecycle is an added benefit that comes with combining DevOps and Agile. Testing becomes a crucial point with the combination of these two. Besides functional measurement used in the Agile approach, DevOps practices require performance and pressure testing of the software. Hence, regular testing is crucial for continuous development and frequent releases.
Pro Tip – Automating the testing process will ease your life to a great extent. Try out a codeless test automation tool that will allow you to clear your selenium debt and enable testing for various scenarios – like web, database, regression and mobile testing in the same test case.
Automation and documentation
Automation of workflow is a different aspect of agile combined with DevOps. Automating all the code scanning methods can help avoid any possible vulnerabilities. Whether you build artifacts in a repository or automate the release out the door, automation of these factors is helpful. It makes your end-to-end the only place employees will be required to check thoroughly for issues manually.
In the Agile method, teams don’t prefer documentation of their communications. Instead, they go for traditional techniques such as pen and paper. On the other hand, DevOps needs complete design documentation and specs to learn about the software releases. Using the latter may not only ensure a more secure documentation process but will also make it easier to share updates with other team members, thereby increasing communication.
Measurement and analysis
Once you have successfully integrated DevOps into the Agile methodology, management would be required to keep track of its improvement. This offers an opportunity for the secure enablement of various releases to production quicker. Hence, creating the metrics to measure its effectiveness is the first thing you must focus on after the launch.
Under the Scrum Alliance Organization support, some of these could be:
- Percentage of adherence to the security measures.
- Percentage increase in release numbers.
- Time taken from ideation to production.
- Defects attributable to platform/support obligations.
- Rate of NFRs met.
Though these tools help streamline and clarify the product creation and deployment methodologies, combining Agile and DevOps requires a change in the company’s strategy. Individuals and enterprises must be trained in both Agile and DevOps courses and training to integrate Agile effectively and DevOps. However, by doing so, you’ll see how it changes your development processes and delivers outcomes in a secure, scalable and sustainable manner.
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