Merging Agile & DevOps. The recipe for success.

Rapid innovation is no longer optional, especially in the app development space. No matter what industry your organization finds yourself in, odds are you are noticing the upheaval of traditional business practices due to the exodus towards a more software-defined economy. 

Poeta always stays ahead of the competition by keeping up with the latest processes and ideologies in product development, and the two that keywords thrown around the most these days are Agile and DevOps. So what do they mean? Are the competitors? Do they overlap? 

In this week’s blog, Poeta are here to answer all those questions and more, and we are going to take a look at how we adapted both ideologies into our process to ship over 300 products worldwide. 

Let's take a look! 

What is Agile? 

Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development, focusing on collaboration, customer feedback, and rapid release schedules that arose in the early 2000’s from the software development industry. Agile was introduced to help development teams better react and adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands. 

In Agile, some extent of the planning and design is done upfront and presented to the client, but the development process is completed in small batches, directly collaborating with clients and stakeholders. Changes are incorporated continuously and a usable version of the product is released in quick succession. This provided a suite of benefits, the most important being the ability to easily switch gears mid-development, adding or removing features as needed without having to completely rework a bunch of code. 

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a term used to describe a set of modern IT practices, which seek to more closely bridge the gap between software developers and operations staff working on the same project, enhancing collaboration and efficiency between teams. The goal here is to break down the barriers that have traditionally existed between these two sides of the IT department, allowing organizations to reduce the time and friction involved in deploying new versions of software or applications – leading to shorter development cycles, saving time and money, and providing the organization with a more competitive edge against competitors still stuck in more traditional development cycles. 

Differences & Similarities

Both ideologies have their similarities and differences. Let's take a look at a few key areas in which they intersect here. 

How do they work together?

Both Agile and DevOps strive towards delivering quality software to clients in a timely manner. The biggest difference between the two ideologies is that agile focuses on optimizing the development life-cycle, while DevOps unites development and operations. These two are certainly not mutually exclusive, and both have their advantages and disadvantages, so using them both depending on project specifics is the sweet spot. 

Merging these two ideologies together has many advantages, such as speeding up delivery, higher client satisfaction, and more effective team collaboration. 

How Merging helps 

There are many advantages to merging agile and DevOps practices. Including, speeding up delivery or products, generally higher client satisfaction, and more effective collaboration within a team(s). However, effectively combining the practices of DevOps with the culture of agile requires changing some existing strategies and attitudes. 

1. Understanding: The agile methodology requires team members to better understand each other’s tasks. Mutual understanding is especially important for Scrum Masters, Project Managers, and Product Owners. To successfully manage a project, they need to know every step required to deliver the product, from design to delivery.
   
   
2. Better collaboration: DevOps involves the development team working together with the operations team. The previously mentioned roles now need to understand all aspects of the development process and operations.
   
   
3. DevOps practices in sprints. Next, the team needs to adopt integrating DevOps while handling sprints. That involves including key members of the DevOps team (along with QA) in planning, daily standups, and retrospectives.
   
   
4. Automate workflows: As automation is an essential part of DevOps development, it should be included in the agile workflow and project planning. Emerging fields, such as AIOps, use artificial intelligence to automate manual workflows in the IT environment.
   
   
5. Measure success: Merging agile and DevOps also involves assessing and measuring key DevOps metrics and KPIs within end-to-end development, and pivoting as needed. 

As mentioned throughout the blog, both Agile and the process of DevOps stand strongly on their own, and depending on the size of your company, then perhaps adopting just one of these and implementing it well is the correct solution for you. Poeta finds that a combination of the two is the perfect solution, and has led us to effectively shipping over 300 products across 5 continents. Each ideology perfectly compliments the other, filling gaps in one with solutions from the other. 

If you require assistance implementing either strategy into your workflow, our team can help. You can learn more about our workflow & automation improvement services, or get in touch with us today for a free consultation. We would love to chat. 

Thanks for reading!