Wizeline DevOps engineer

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Agile Is Not Possible Without DevOps

Agile Is Not Possible Without DevOps

There is no Agile without DevOps. As the hype and hope for digital transformation grows, many companies have started thinking about Agile. But what is Agile and why is it not enough without also incorporating DevOps principles?

The Agile Manifesto doesn’t capture the bigger picture, which is how to maximize value and achieve the end goal of the organization, company, or product. 

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

Becoming a high-performing organization

Software teams can apply their understanding of the Agile principles displayed above and implement some of the most common frameworks, such as scrum. Companies gather different individuals from the organization and form a cross-functional team, then assign some roles from the playbook such as product owner or Scrum master. Even if they follow the manifesto and apply Agile methodologies, the core processes and capabilities at the company haven’t changed.

There will be barriers either to reach the customer, because a dictatorial product owner is still hyper-focused on requirements instead of data and learnings, or there will be a wall between development and operations that will prevent flow throughout the entire process. 

Wizeline DevOps team members

If the product team is not fully integrated, having access to the longer cycles of the business, from ideation to analysis, Agile is only a mirage, also referred to as “cargo cult Agile.” Similarly, if the Agile team doesn’t operate with the product in production, the possibilities to learn and improve are limited and the value stream is disconnected and misaligned. 

If we look at DevOps as the full extent of lean practices applied to the technology life cycle, and not only as the concepts of release engineering and automation, DevOps becomes the core capability that will allow Agile teams and their companies to transform and become digitally integrated. 

Technology life cycle

  1. Ideate
  2. Research
  3. Design 
  4. Build 
  5. Deploy 
  6. Release
  7. Analyze (Learn)  

In order to maximize the outcome out of the technology value stream, it’s important to allow feedback loops across the production network, both for short and long business cycles. 

Man explaining DevOps principles

Principles for maximizing outcomes

In the book The DevOps Handbook, the authors discuss the three core principles of DevOps that high-performing organizations follow:

  • Flow to maximize throughput and delivery
  • Feedback to accelerate learning and create better products  
  • Continuous learning and experimentation to allow the organization to improve and evolve

At Wizeline, we partner with different types of organizations, forming high-performing teams to accelerate and improve platform and product development. Our teams focus on maximizing and enabling these principles.

We encourage cross-functional teams to set their own goals and metrics, because every project and customer are different. For example, one team measures Flow looking at the full cycle of a user story, from ideation to production; another team, to maximize Feedback Loops, ensures the platform has built-in capabilities to measure performance, usage, and engagement, allowing the product team to learn along the way and keep improving.

Companies that embrace a Continuous Learning and Experimentation culture show better team performance as product innovation flows faster and customer satisfaction is higher. 

Teams and companies that want to succeed in their digital strategy while optimizing software delivery have to go beyond Scrum and Agile. They have to achieve a real DevOps culture that fosters communication, transparency, and collaboration.

 

Written by Anibal Abarca, CTO at Wizeline
Written by Anibal Abarca, CTO at Wizeline

Nellie Luna

Posted by Nellie Luna on September 3, 2019