Making the most out of DevOps and Agile

Delivery methodologies like Agile and DevOps are transforming the software development landscape as enterprises become more customer-centric. DevOps brings operations and development teams together for greater productivity. What it means is that the blending together of Dev and Ops teams make for fast-paced development of production-ready code, with operations like testing, deployment, and management to prevent backlogs. DevOps stresses effective collaboration and communication between the multiple stakeholders thereby creating a culture that enables optimized release cycles of high-quality and thoroughly tested end-products. Meanwhile, all Agile models in practice follow concepts and principles which can be integrated with DevOps e.g. continuous build, continuous integration, continuous delivery, incremental testing, etc.

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): The Scaled Agile Framework was developed by Dean Leffingwell and became very popular in no time. This framework is a combination of existing lean and agile principles with a highly structured and prescriptive method that helps large enterprises in aligning their entire organization to agile.

Moreover, SAFe has already been provisioned for DevOps to focus on tighter integration between development and deployment. So, for teams implementing SAFe, one can easily apply inbuilt DevOps by leveraging the framework guidelines about the DevOps team and System Team to integrate the Ops, Dev teams.

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD): DAD framework provides a cohesive approach to Agile solution delivery. It is a hybrid approach that suggests strategies from many Agile flavors like Extreme Programming (XP), Kanban, Lean Software Development, Unified Process (UP), and many other methods.

DAD is a non-proprietary, freely available framework. DevOps culture forms the crux of the DAD framework. This framework covers all key aspects of DevOps principles in different strategies – general, operations, teaming, and release management. An in-depth understanding of the guidelines of this framework will help to develop strategies and effective correlation to DevOps for your organization.

Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS):  Introduced by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, the LeSS framework helps the scrum team to scale up without adding additional processes or overheads. This framework helps organizations to dissolve unnecessary complexity and solving problems in simpler ways.

Unlike SAFe, the LeSS framework does not call out DevOps explicitly on its big picture but concepts like technical excellence, structure, and adoption cover key aspects of DevOps guidelines and principles. Technical excellence covers Continuous integration, Continuous delivery, while structure talks about Ops and Support team’s role, and adoption includes ‘Continuous Improvement’.

For instance, to implement DevOps along with LeSS, customization of LeSS concepts is required along with an effective correlation of these concepts with DevOps principles. You need to define a team and design specific roles to achieve the desired benefits.