Why is Integrating DevOps and Agile Best for Your Business Growth?

In today’s modern technological development world, organizations are concentrating more on speedy deliveries along with maintaining the greatest customer value. 

DevOps and Agile are two different technologies with the aim of delivering the same output.

Organizations are being digitally modified by embracing advanced technologies, new tools, and techniques. Organizations are becoming more engrossed in combating the digital economy to improve performance.

DevOps and Agile practices are important in acquiring these goals of coherent cooperation, collaborations, and bug-free code. And the Agile DevOps integration has made businesses to pace in the software development area. 

For the speedy delivery of software, DevOps is used to reduce the number of steps in the entire software development process. On the other hand, the agile software development process focuses more on software development to improve the velocity and profitability of project management.

However, a combination of DevOps and Agile will help to overcome the failings and challenges of each other with benefits like customer satisfaction, faster delivery, higher revenue, and more profit.

Let’s dig more into the topic of why integrating DevOps with Agile is best for the business.

DevOps and Agile: How Are They Separate Concepts?

The DevOps approach assisted with Agile strategy can be placed in coherence with each other. 

What is DevOps?

• DevOps fills the cracks between the operational and development systems. Embracing DevOps will boost the administration and operational ability through a tough-agile approach.
• The development and operational teams (DevOps) cofunction throughout the software development cycle to attain certain objectives that are aimed at by the organization.
• The main goal of DevOps is to manage the quality and swiftness of the product. It will help organizations achieve customer gratification.
• Integrating Agile and DevOps can fine-tune and streamline the software development cycle. DevOps assists in optimizing the processes.

In an organization, DevOps competence relies on technologies, processes, and people. In addition to this, organizations now want to have IT operations to support modern digital business. 

They require an agility platform to be successful in this digitalized world.

Agile development, or agility, is not only about software development and IT operations; it is much more than that.

What is Agile?

• Agile is a practice or a methodology that involves requirements, discovery, and solutions through the collaboration of functional teams and users.
• Agile follows the approach of adaptable planning, development, delivery, and tensile response to the changes in requirements, capacity, and understanding of the problems.
• The agile approach concentrates more on aligning development with end-user’s needs and requirements on a continuous basis.
• Agile promotes teamwork, evolvability, and accountability to focus more on users rather than processes and tools.

Let’s see how agility and DevOps are interlinked with each other.

Here are Some Agility Features That are Applicable to DevOps

Mindset and Culture

DevOps needs a cultural change among the teams. Enterprises can properly make use of the tools and technologies only if the individuals in the team collaborate. The operational team should support the development team and the other way round.

Values and Principles

These are some major elements of every major agile practice and DevOps. And these values and principles are followed by both the development and operational teams.

Tools and Technologies

Productive use of toolkits and technologies for ceaseless delivery and integration, build, deployment, and testing for effective automation.

Practices

DevOps demands refurbished agile practices and methods to bring about infrastructure supply, continuous monitoring, automation, and assisted applications in a production environment.

There must be constant and flawless communication among the development and operational teams for continual integration, testing, deployment, and release. 

DevOps vs. Agile

Now that we have got an idea about DevOps methodology and Agile methodology, let’s understand their similarities and differences to know Agile DevOps better.

Similarities

Both the Agile and DevOps methodologies correlate with each other and therefore can work in conjunction.

• Agile quickly acclimates to changing requirements while colluding better between smaller teams.
• DevOps allows continuous automated integration and implementation to enable quick-release while cooperating among the smaller teams.
• When applied in order, Agile DevOps allows faster development and deployment at the same time while keeping the customer’s requirements in mind.

Differences

In the case of differences in DevOps and Agile methodologies, their scheduling processes are different.

• Agile uses weekly or monthly sprints to establish features that should be created during the sprints.
• DevOps sets multiple schedules for implementations to minimize the correlated business impacts.

After understanding the similarities and differences, we should choose the resources carefully.

Points to Consider While Integrating DevOps and Agile

For the smooth integration process, we have mentioned some of the points that you might encounter during the implementation of AgileDevOps.

Plus, we also state some methods to overcome these points/challenges.

Smooth Teamwork Flow

To get the most out of the DevOps business value and Agile methodology, the team members should have a wider understanding of all the development processes and things related to the developmental process.

All the contributors to the project, such as the product owner, system admin, scrum master, and operations manager, have to consider and contribute to the development process along with its delivery and continuation.

Describing the Software Lifecycle

The software lifecycle is defined as making an effort for the DevOps implementation in association with the agile framework. If we incorporate DevOps principles from the start of the project’s development, it will improve consistency and reduce the cost by minimizing errors. Thus, the product delivery will be fast.

DevOps

If you have read the above part, Agile vs. DevOps, then you know that Agile strategy is divided into weekly or monthly sprints. It becomes all-important to align the DevOps process while managing Agile sprints.

You can use the below-given points to start the DevOps approach in your agile sprints.

• Confirm the presence of all the contributors at the starting stage.
• Discuss in detail product functionality and accessibility features.
• Add the DevOps team to daily meetings, backlog planning, and review sprints for better alignment.

QA

Quality assurance is a necessary step to ensure that there are no bugs or errors at every stage of product development. The agile framework should be checked regularly for its scalability, and the DevOps should be examined regularly for performance and load testing of the software.

Thus, quality assurance is an equally important step in continuous development.

Carry out Service Backlog Under DevOps

During DevOps and Agile integration, it is crucial to redesign the service backlog process. The DevOps structure should include the below-given elements:

• Integration efficiency
• Logging
• Service monitoring
• Software scalability
• Testing
• Alerts setting
• Security and compliance

Using the Right Tools

By leveraging the right tools, you can achieve successful adoption of Agile and DevOps in software development.

The software development tools help in designing the framework using Infrastructure as a Code that is necessary for DevOps.

Automation

Automation will directly reduce the chances of errors. Thus, this same concept is applied during the integration of agile and DevOps. Automation will result in fewer errors, and so it will lead to the improved overall productivity of the team.

Analysis

Estimation of certain metrics helps in understanding the performance and advancement of the work, which, in turn, will help in the successful release of the product. Some points that should be taken into consideration are:

• Total time taken from production to release.
• Percentage increase in release numbers
• Support requirements for all platforms
• Percentage of non-functional requirements

The Benefits of Agile and DevOps Integration

DevOps and Agile integration will provide better business performance and productivity. Some of the major benefits of using DevOps and Agile together are:

• The release process will be simplified, and the service/product offering will be improved.
• It allows for maximized collaboration.
• Incorporation of the constant delivery pipeline.
• It provides greater value and less risk with each release.
• There will be fewer bugs and quick bug and error fixes.
• Visibility will be improved.
• Development of more effective and qualitative products.

Endnote

I am sure the combination and the benefits of Agile and DevOps are clear now. And there is no doubt that integrating these two practices will help companies to align and smoothen the product lifecycle and its release.

Some people also consider DevOps as a part or an augmentation of Agile. Agile methodology focuses on the removal of barriers between the developmental and organizational framework.

Moreover, agile is not just a methodology, and DevOps is not only about technical expertise.

And DevOps and Agile can both create major differences in the software development process.

Thus, by integrating DevOps and agile, businesses can experience exponential growth and can generate more revenue. 

How Can Extern Labs be Helpful?

Every successful product development or transformation of an organization needs the expertise to handle the projects with deep understanding, planning, and technical knowledge.

At Extern Labs, the team is committed to delivering top technology solutions. With a strong customer base and years of experience, we are among the fast-growing software development companies providing Agile DevOps and cloud computing services.

Reach out to our experts today to talk through your requirements for Agile DevOps solutions.