The transformation from Agile to DevOps – Why is DevOps Emphasized over Agile?

There was a discussion between a couple of startup founders last week.  I own a technology services business, one of the founders own a SaaS product for B2B customers, and the other is working on a Retail space. They had their challenges on executing the product development. Both teams have well-defined development process. They both implemented the entire recommendations and best practices on Agile standards. The team is smart. They are doing a great job. Still, there are shortcomings on the expected results out of the product delivery. Both are small technical teams working out of a single location, even clueless on what could be improved.

 

I started suggesting the gap which they have to work against to achieve the desired results. Here I am encapsulating some of the points from our discussion in this blog post.

 

Agile approaches in software development have always been a great support to produce a better result and a better product. Agile delivers not only better and possible positive impact,  yet, a flexible approach in Software Development. It enables getting the software product as envisioned by the developers and clients. However, with the continually changing trend, agile gradually disappear, as this Agile methodology can be implemented only during the development phase, whereas the operation department was left behind. This discontinuity, in turn, means that the users are delayed receiving the new value of the produced product. Moreover, ends up in the situation on detained business rewards occurs.

 

Regardless of Agile experiences continuous innovation, improvement and learning according to the change in project requirements and new functionalities to be added, it is still expected to be flexible and adaptable, especially to incorporate constant changes happening in the development process.  Perhaps, to say, Agile fails to combine the operational team, particularly at the early stage of the development cycle, which is very important to achieve better productivity and expected results.

 

DevOps

 

As a better alternative to the Agile development, DevOps is trending in the development industry. DevOps approach is becoming a holistic approach, which instead of focusing just on the software development, also incorporates the entire IT team and other professionals.

 

Why Implementing DevOps emphasized over Agile?

 

Any business that wants to be competitive should undoubtedly begin to experience a new digital evolution in the product development. Moreover, it should also embrace comprehensive approaches to the digital transformation with the desire to innovate any organizational structure. This DevOps practice stresses the fact that being successful from just one axis of development is not enough, which makes it essential to think of something more than Agile for software product development. In this connotation, DevOps arises to be an evolution amalgamating various aspects of software development, than just focusing on one process.

 

Although DevOps builds the software product on the best principles of Agile, it still has some fundamental differences. It seeks to synchronize development, operations, and stakeholders to encourage continuous collaboration, with the critical purpose of developing robust software without deploying backlogs.

 

Also Read  : 5 Major Challenges of DevOps Implementation

 

To specify, DevOps is not varied from Agile, however, with a better involvement from operations. DevOps mainly aims to address the gap between development and operations team through the interactions of an extended team that can deliver a perfect solution. DevOps treats software produced as a unified and single activity while bridging the gap between creation and delivery of software.

 

The working culture of DevOps emphasizes a productive collaboration between departments to develop a thoroughly-tested high-quality software. With added things to consider, implementing DevOps may appear to be a challenging task to enterprises, as it requires a thoughtful leadership that can adequately address any defaults and roadblocks.

 

With many significant advantages to be noticed and experienced, the development team begins to convince their clients for a shift to DevOps, particularly in a compelling case. DevOps enables project work manageable and easily adjust according to the specific needs. It makes testing and validation better than before, which allowing to achieve desired goals without defaults. Any development team that realizes the benefits of DevOps would undoubtedly seek an agile transformation.