How to Combine DevOps and Agile

Enterprises are now getting digitally modified by adopting developing technologies with new tools and methods. They are now more focused on competing with the digital economy to enhance performance on all levels.

They require to improve flexibility in business-supporting abilities, raise product quality, raise financial performance and improve speed-to-market for customer-facing products. Agile and DevOps practices are important in accomplishing these goals of effective cooperation, collaboration, and bug-free code, and managing competitive elasticity.

DevOps implementation concentrates also on the software scalability, how great it could be deployed, and also its monitoring and maintenance after future releases However, there is also a downside to common DevOps advantages. The system does not involve the kind of continuous testing and development that Agile offers. 

This has led to Agile methods being overwhelmingly concentrated on what you might define as the development phases of software delivery. Though, there is less focus on operational features.

Hence, both practices are quite important to be implemented in the SDLC of any product. 

What is achieved by DevOps and Agile Integration?

The integration of DevOps and Agile benefits in the following areas:

• Streamlines the release procedure and enhances product offerings.
• Provides better collaboration.
• More value and fewer risks in each release. 
• Fewer bugs and faster fixes.
• Increased visibility.
• Higher user satisfaction standards as the products are more qualitative.

What to Pay Attention to When Combining DevOps and Agile

To simplify the process of performing DevOps into Agile product development we have chosen the most common pitfalls that might occur through this process and how to avoid them getting your process working smoothly.

Improve Teamwork Flow

Using the DevOps structure and Agile approach together makes it important that team members have a wider understanding of all development phases. You know DevOps business value and the practicality of Agile collectively. 

Team members such as the Product Owner, and Scrum Master, simultaneously with operations, infrastructure, and sysadmin roles require to consider not only the software development procedure but also delivery and maintenance. Your organizations should be equipped with the experience of release, service and transition management, environment provisioning, automation and tools, and application deployment. Build-and-run product-centric teams resolve the dilemma of the Agile development-to-operations hand-off.

Defining the Lifecycle

Successfully trying a DevOps implementation plan with an Agile framework suggests defining the product lifecycle. This improves consistency, decreases cost by minimizing waste, and speeds up time to market. Companies now inherit more of the operational concern within the whole lifecycle. Therefore, it’s ideal if you begin to perform some of the DevOps principles right at the start of your development process. 

DevOps Adoption in Sprints

Agile workflow allows the software development process divided into sprints, hence it’s strategic to integrate DevOps administration while handling sprints.

Follow these instructions as you begin working the DevOps strategy into your Sprints.

• Invite ops/infrastructure/support staff to planning sessions.
• Examine product functionality and operability features.
• Incorporate them in the upcoming sprint.
• Include the DevOps team in sprint backlog planning and regular meeting, as well as sprint review and scrum and strategy alignment.

The engagement and collaboration of your development team and operations team also have the ops team alongside functionality release timelines. The ops team can then support the dev team in preparing the release schedule with higher accuracy and can support the dev team in shipping the product quicker.

Including QA in Each Phase

Obtaining the QA portion of the whole development lifecycle is another crucial factor when integrating DevOps and Agile. Testing allows a vital position when combining the two. Besides functional testing implemented in Agile, the DevOps strategy needs performance and load testing of the software. Therefore, constant testing is equally as important as continuous development.

Implement Service Backlog Under DevOps

When implementing DevOps and Agile together, you require to rebuild your service backlogging method. As below DevOps framework, it should involve: 

• Scalability of the software.
• Deployment capability.
• Service monitoring.
• Logging.
• Setting alerting. 
• Software testing. 
• Security and compliance aspects.
• Operational performance.

Leveraging the Right Tools

Utilizing the right tools is the solution to successful Agile and DevOps adoption into your software development. Keep in mind that implements to your software development process configuration management tools to build and replicate infrastructure utilizing the Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) concept required for DevOps. This encourages developers to deploy the application on various types of platforms without any reworking efforts.

Automation

Automation of workflow is another component of Agile combining with DevOps. Try to automate all the code scanning methods and avoid any possible vulnerabilities. Build artifacts in a container, or automate the release out the door. Automate those elements so your end-to-end goalposts are the one possible situations where someone has to manually verify for issues.

Documentation 

While in the Agile method, teams don’t document their meeting minutes or other communications. Rather, they prefer lo-fi methods such as pen and paper. DevOps, on the other hand, needs whole design documentation and specs to understand a software release.

Measurement and Analysis

Well, after constituting DevOps into Agile project management to maintain track of its progress, you require to care about building the metrics to estimate its effectiveness. This enables the successful enablement of various releases to production faster. As below the Scrum Alliance Organization recommendations, some of these could be:

• Percentage of release date adherences.
• Percentage rise in release numbers.
• Time is taken for release to production.
• Defects attributable to platform/support requirements.
• Percentage of NFRs met.

Though you can set other metrics during DevOps implementation to measure that have higher business value.

Why DevOps and Agile both matter should be understood now. Though these methods serve to streamline and clarify the product creation and deployment methods, combining Agile and DevOps needs a shift in the organizations. But putting efforts in merging Agile and DevOps management in the correct way, you will see how it can enhance your development process and deliver results in secure, scalable, and maintainable applications.

So are you looking to integrate DevOps with your organization? TestUnity experts can help you get the complete outline of what software testers focus on to effectively navigate the road to success. Connect with our testing experts at TestUnity to know more about DevOps and Agile.

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