Agile can drive lean development and operational automation, towards improving response back to the end user. In this whitepaper, we will explore how DevOps can help streamline the agile development process and provide with a more e cient collaboration across departments.
Setting the Tone
In today’s world, customers are demanding high service and businesses need to respond. Rapid customer response through efficient development and deployment are critical in creating a positive customer experience. Traditional development and operations silos don’t scale well for rapid response, an approach that is end-user driven is needed.
Development and operations are traditionally siloed departments. Communication is limited to handoffs and optimization efforts are focused locally, hence cross- department collaboration is often discouraged.
Bringing together development and operations into a single team may not always be feasible, there are external factors that can affect this type collaboration, working hours, processes, and geography can limit having a single, committed, rapid response team.
WHEN DEVOPS COMES IN PLACE
DevOps is achieved through the collaboration and knowledge sharing between development and operations roles to deliver fixes quickly and develop with an operational mindset. This approach adopts several Agile practices to achieve this goal: frequent information transfer through collaboration, continuous and regular release of solutions to end users, and prompt response to end-user and system feedback and change.
DevOps concepts are not new but they are constantly evolving. Nowadays, when talking about DevOps concepts like Agile, lean, development and operational automation need to be considered.
Where does DevOps provide value?
- Improves relationships with Operations: Helps take in the perspectives and concerns of other teams as you perform your responsibilities which increases the success of hand-offs. With more weight lifted from the operations teams’ shoulders, they can dedicate more time for system improvements and streamlining processes to increase throughput.
- Helps reveal problems early: DevOps practices emphasize the importance of early and continuous testing during the development of the application and continuous monitoring after it is deployed. The goal is reveal and address business and technical defects early in the lifecycle, ideally before it is exposed to production environments and end users. This will help reduce the downstream costs to fix defects.
- Bringing operational insights into development earlier in order to improve delivery throughput by mitigating operational risks early, and to identify opportunities to fine-tune products for better performance and end user experience.
- Quickly Fix Defects: DevOps embraces cross-functional teams where each member has some knowledge and skills with development, testing, operations, and architecture. Teams know immediately who to contact to troubleshoot the issue if it is beyond their skill set to address. Since deployments are also smaller in size, the scope of complications is smaller and typically less complex, which reduces the time needed to assess and fix defects.
- Creating optimized development and operations environments as well as integrating the two with a focus on the end user will help resolve issues faster.
- Shortening the response time to user needs.