Understanding the Landscape of Advanced Businesses With Agile & DevOps
97 percent of businesses expect to maintain some threshold of telecommuting after the global epidemic. To maintain a competitive advantage, businesses must accelerate application integration, innovation, and deployment. Businesses must be adaptable in order to respond to shifting customer requirements and market possibilities. As a result, many businesses are switching to Agile and DevOps, with those who master them seeing a 60% increase in revenue and earnings growth over their competing companies.
Presently, however, only 18% of businesses are agile masters. Many businesses are incorporating Agile and DevOps into their IT departments. However, agility masters implement Agile and DevOps all across their organization. This is critical for businesses to stay competitive – How do organizations scale agile and DevOps?
But, before deciphering the mechanism behind how do agile and devops interrelate, let’s go through what is an accurate description of agile and devops –
What Exactly Is Agile?
Agile is a development framework that emphasizes collaboration and user feedback. Agile teams are constantly improving their software in response to customer feedback. In agile approaches, major questions include why clients desire software and what type of software they require.
Agile frameworks use a lean production delivery approach. This diminishes manufacturing and low latency, allowing for the agile’s brief release cycles. This is critical if team members are to keep up with evolving needs of customers.
Agile Practices
Agile teams must utilize the effective team task management software. Scrum and Kanban are visual workflow productivity tools that can structure functions and monitor performance. They also enable teams to establish a constant level of progress through the use of time boxing (assigning a fixed time period to every phase).
Teamhood is a Kanban inspired project management tool that helps your team organize work and deliver the best results. Visualize your process on a task board. Track tasks and subtasks through the progress steps. Estimate effort and track time to compare. Draw task dependencies to create realistic estimates.
Sprints are sequential time boxes used in agile methodology. Agile teams modify prospective sprints according to the outcomes of previous phases. Every sprint adheres to a single framework, continuing to deliver at a consistent pace and concentrating on individual customers.
What Exactly Is DevOps?
DevOps stands to be a value system that promotes collaboration in order to deliver benefits to patrons. Its primary goal is to increase performance via automation of business processes. DevOps assembles multidisciplinary teams right from product development and IT operations to quality assurance, and security.
Cross-disciplinary teams can effectively react to client requirements by aligning their endeavors. They can also shorten production schedules, helping corporations to bring products onto the market more quickly. DevOps covers the entire application lifecycle, initiating from planning phase, development and testing, delivery, operation till the monitoring part.
DevOps Techniques
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are the “dev” in DevOps. Continuous Integration simply signifies that programmers must consistently merge revisions into a centralized database. After that, this database is used in continuous delivery. CD refers to the use of automation tools by programmers to create and prior to deployment ecosystems and strengthen software code.
Continuous deployment is the “ops” in DevOps. It is used by devs to place the outcomes of CI/CD into production.
Numerous different DevOps methods are as follows:
- Version control is the process of monitoring multiple variations of code in order to make it easier to evaluate and retrieve code.
- Infrastructure as code is the technique of handling system resources as though they were code. Through automation, this ensures that developers deploy resources in a consistent and controlled manner.
- Configuration management refers to the method of maintaining the state of system resources including servers and an ETL database. This enables teams to make improvements without the need to alter the configuration settings.
- Continuous monitoring: gathering information and creating notifications to supervise system performance and health.
What Does Agile as well as DevOps Scaling Imply?
First and foremost, agile and DevOps really aren’t concepts that go hand-in-hand. Both strategies provide companies with a tried-and-true foundation for accelerating software development. They can also enhance staff productivity and efficiency just like staff management solutions. 75 percent of companies by now recognize that agile and DevOps work better next to each other.
Leveraging agile and DevOps involves integrating their practices throughout the organization. However, few businesses take them over and above software development and IT. From SaaS companies to cloud contact centers, any business can scale agile and DevOps. If you’re wondering what a cloud contact center is, it’s an internet-based call center that’s ideal for implementing agile and DevOps at scale.
Now let us take a glance at a few accessible scaled agile and DevOps paradigms –
Agile Frameworks that Scale
There are numerous scaled agile methods in place, such as:
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): an approach for coordinating teamwork that integrates flex, agile, and DevOps techniques. SAFe remains the most widely used framework, with 37% of agile businesses utilizing it.
- Scrum@Scale (S@S) divides how (product delivery) and what (product planning) into 2 distinct loops.
- Large Scale Scrum (LeSS): teams are organized around various product functionalities. For example, in SaaS application development, one team may be responsible for vocal functionalities and yet another for security.
- Nexus: Nexus, like S@S, strives to decrease sophistication and coordinate activities across teams.
- Disciplined Agile (DA) concentrates on the ‘what’ by demonstrating how business operations interact at scale. However, it tends to leave the “how” to companies.
Frameworks for Scaled DevOps
SAFe is a scaled schema that relates to both DevOps and agile. However, there are DevOps-specific frameworks that put the spotlight on automated systems. When combined with automated testing, this enables organizations to concentrate on product innovation, increasing the competitiveness of their goods.
Frameworks for DevOps encompass:
- Ansible, amongst many other things, focuses on automating configuration management (CM), and app deployment.
- Puppet: provides automation tools for product innovation, deployment, tracking, and configuration.
- Chef: enables organizations to streamline mechanisms throughout numerous devices and servers.
- Salt is an evolving interaction and automation platform. Applications include everything from handling a customer support tech stack to infrastructure management.
- Jenkins: an advanced server with a plethora of plugins for integrating with nearly all kinds of tools in the CI/CD toolkit.
The Difficulties of Scaling Agile and DevOps
When it comes to scaling agile and DevOps, companies encounter problems, along with:
- Corporate culture: 43% of businesses say their organizational culture contradicts agile values; 42 percent say their organization prevents transformation; and 75 percent say silos thwart their attempts.
- Lack of expertise 42 percent of businesses report that their teams struggle to compete to implement agile.
- Dearth of innovation: DevOps teams devote 27 percent of their time on conventional CI/CD functions on average, posing a challenge to practice DevOps at scale.
- The absence of leadership: 41 percent of businesses are impeded by a lack of engagement from management.
- Segmented tool chains: 30% of organizations face that tool chain ambiguity impedes DevOps progress, and 61% believe that segmented tool chains hinder advancement.
Businesses should indeed deal with these obstacles in order to scale agile and DevOps. Now let us take a closer look at how to accomplish this.
Scaling Agile and DevOps
A few problems have simple solutions. Businesses, for instance, can spend money on training to resolve a lack of abilities. Other issues seem to be more pervasive, such as organizational culture and an absence of leadership development training. Others will require a digital platform.
To scale agile and DevOps, you must do the following:
Encourage Collaboration:
Collaboration is a fundamental tenet of agile and DevOps. Cross-disciplinary teams are incubators of new ideas. The accomplishment of collaborative incidents such as hackathons demonstrates this. To effectively scale agile and DevOps, you must facilitate collaboration. Management teams must inculcate an open and honest level of communication in order to accomplish this. This commences at the top level. Collaborative software, such as cloud computing, also could aid in the elimination of silos and enhance teamwork.
Obtain Management Support:
To implement agile and DevOps at scale, you must begin at the top. Top-down leadership helps individuals in embracing the changes brought about by agile and DevOps. It also aids in reducing the distance among development and operations. As a result, you must involve managers from the beginning. 78 percent of leaders acknowledge that agile and DevOps at scale gain (or could benefit) their business. However, if executives are hesitant, company stakeholders and digital review boards can take the initiative. Top management will take the plunge when they realize the perks of scaled agile and DevOps, such as productivity gains.
Make an Investment in Automation:
Automation is already recognized as important by 74% of businesses. Automation frees up resources such as time spent performing manual tasks, allows organizations to stay ahead of the competition. It also enables them to handle their agile and DevOps tool chains more effectively. Businesses that want to scale agile and DevOps must engage in automation. Companies can use computer controlled platforms with a console administrator to incorporate tool chains and accelerate product development and delivery.
Transition from Monitoring to Observability:
Businesses must continue moving over and above tracking to visibility in order to scale Agile and DevOps frameworks. In fact, 74% of businesses believe that comprehensive observability will be critical to DevOps in the coming years. Observability entails much more simply responding to notifications. It allows organizations to preemptively optimize efficiency by monitoring detailed metrics such as the amount of errors made over a given time period. These performance measures can be merged with customer information. This provides businesses with a complete perspective of how their software behaves and how consumers interact with it.
Businesses that are agile are able to compete.
Agile and DevOps provide businesses with increased productivity and speed, particularly when used in tandem. However, in order to reach new thresholds of competitive spirit, businesses also must employ them on scale.
Businesses must increase collaboration, have management teams on deck, and engage in automated processes and observability to actually accomplish this.
