Agile Methodology & Devops

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 We follow Agile-DevOps, It is a combination of software development and IT operations supported by agile methodologies. This is built with the idea of responding to change. And it is considered to fulfil the needs of the customer. 

What is Accomplished by DevOps and Agile Integration?

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

• Streamlines the release      process and improves product offerings.
• Allows for better      collaboration.
• More value and fewer risks      in each release. 
• Fewer bugs and faster fixes.
• Increased visibility.

Higher user satisfaction rates as the products are more qualitative 

What to Pay Attention to When Integrating DevOps and Agile

To simplify the process of implementing DevOps into Agile product development we have gathered the most common pitfalls that might happen during this process and how to avoid them making your process working smoothly.

Improve Teamwork Flow

Using the DevOps framework and Agile approach together makes it crucial that team members have a broader understanding of all development aspects. You get DevOps business value and the practicality of Agile together. 

Team members such as the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the PM, along with operations, infrastructure and sysadmin roles need to consider not only the software development process but also delivery and maintenance. Your teams should be equipped with the knowledge of release, service and change management, environment provisioning, automation and tools, and application deployment. Build-and-run product-centric teams solve the problem of the Agile development-to-operations hand-off.

Defining the Lifecycle

Successfully attempting a DevOps implementation plan with an Agile framework means defining the product lifecycle. This increases consistency, reduces cost by minimizing waste and speeds up a time to market. Teams now inherit more of the operational concern within the entire lifecycle. Therefore, it’s ideal if you start to implement some of the DevOps principles right at the beginning of your development process. 

DevOps Adoption in Sprints

Agile workflow assumes the software development process divided into sprints, therefore it’s strategic to integrate DevOps management while handling sprints.

Follow these instructions as you start working the DevOps approach into your Sprints.

• Invite      ops/infrastructure/support personnel to planning sessions.
• Discuss product      functionality and operability features.
• Include them in the upcoming      sprint.
• Involve the DevOps team in      sprint backlog planning and daily meeting, as well as sprint review and      scrum and plan alignment.

The engagement and collaboration of your development team and operations team also keeps the ops team abreast of functionality release timelines. The ops team can then help the dev team in planning the release schedule with greater accuracy and can assist the dev team in shipping the product faster.

Including QA in Each Phase

Making the QA part of the entire development lifecycle is another essential factor when integrating DevOps and Agile. Testing assumes a vital position when combining the two. Besides functional testing applied in Agile, DevOps approach requires performance and load testing of the software. Hence, constant testing is equally as important as continuous development.

Implement Service Backlog Under DevOps

When implementing DevOps and Agile together, you need to rebuild your service backlogging process. As under DevOps framework, it should include: 

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

Leveraging the Right Tools

Using the right tools is the key to successful Agile and DevOps adoption into your software development. Keep in mind that applies to your software development process configuration management tools to create and replicate infrastructure using the Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) concept needed for DevOps. This helps developers to deploy the application on different types of platforms without any reworking efforts.

Automation

Automation of workflow is another part of Agile combining with DevOps. Try to automate all the code scanning processes and avoid any potential vulnerabilities. Build artifacts in a repository, or automate the release out the door. Automate these elements entirely so your end-to-end goalposts are the one possible places where someone has to manually check for issues.

Documentation 

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

Measurement and Analysis

Well, after building DevOps into Agile project management to keep track of its progress, you need to care about establishing the metrics to measure its effectiveness. This allows for the successful enablement of multiple releases to production faster. As under the Scrum Alliance Organization recommendations, some of these could be:

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

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

Why DevOps and Agile both matter should be obvious now. Though these practices serve to streamline and simplify the product creation and deployment processes, combining Agile and DevOps requires a shift in the organizations. But putting efforts in combining Agile and DevOps management in the right way, you will see how it can improve your development process and deliver results in reliable, scalable and maintainable applications.