An organization needs to implement different software for smooth functioning and stay ahead in this competitive business world. Digital transformation is essential for staying connected with the recent development in digitalization. Modern software is developed in such a way to overcome the different challenges faced during business growth.
Agile is the application that helps the organization in collaborations within the organization and the different cross-functional teams, and software end-users and aims in enhancing the speed and quality of work.
The DevOps application helps in efficient collaboration of software development with the IT operations while aiming to reduce the time required for the lifecycle development and also ensures continuous delivery. Implementing the DevOps system during the software development process helps in reducing the steps for bringing it to market. It also helps in focusing on software scalability, monitoring, and maintenance after the release.
Why Agile & DevOps for Digital Transformation?
The Agile and DevOps applications work together in conjugation for delivering products and services with enhanced quality. Combining the Agile sprints with DevOps help in optimizing the development cycle and efficient product maintenance.
Both these methodologies help developers to tackle all the challenges like inter-departmental complexities and delayed feedback loops during software development. The organization gains several advantages by implementing the Agile and DevOps applications in this business including:
- Leads to maximization of collaboration.
- Minimization of hardware provisioning.
- Streamlines the release process and improves product offerings.
- Implements continuous integrations through the delivery pipeline.
- Increases value and lower risks in each release.
- Identification of bugs and faster fixing of issues.
- Increases visibility.
- Enhances user satisfaction rates.
- Provide services with one-click deployment.
- Modernization of IT infrastructure and applications.
- Uses of API-enabling legacy systems.
- Shifting from monolithic technology to micro-service architecture, etc.
Technology Synchronization of DevOps & Agile
Many developers are worried about whether Agile and DevOps synchronize well technology-wise. Well, the answer would be a big YES!
Companies and developers can make use of agile software development methodologies to experience enhanced speed and creativity in handling DevOps. Both these two methodologies incorporate Virtualization which plays a key role in empowering the IT environment in an organization.
Apart from that, it assists an organization to enjoy the benefits of Agile and DevOps by scaling the resources. With the integration of DevOps and Agile methodologies, companies can easily enhance the efficiency of the software development process and increase the software deployment speed.
Different Ways of Using Agile and DevOps Services
Though both methodologies Agile & DevOps are totally different and interrelated, they are possessing critical characteristics of the software development life cycle. These are several smart ways in which the Agile and DevOps services can be used together by the organization for heading toward digital evolution.
Here are the lists of top 5 ways for implementing the Agile and DevOps services together by an organization, take a look.
1. Assessment
It is important to access the current state of the organization and then create the roadmap for the next steps that are essential for the product development lifecycle. The main steps included in the assessment include checking the cultural readiness, previous implementations, leadership responsibilities, IT service management process, etc.
2. Small and Straightforward Strategy
It is essential to improve the teamwork flow. The team should understand the development aspects involved in the product lifecycle. The different team members along with the operations, system, and infrastructure should know their role in the product development process. The team should be equipped with knowledge regarding the tools, automation, environment provisioning, application deployment, etc.
Agility should be applied in a step-wise manner. The agile framework should be implemented while defining the product lifecycle this will help in increasing the consistency, reducing the cost, minimizing wastage, and fastening the process while reducing the time to market.
The process starts with creating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that helps in providing value to the organization, its employees, and its customers.
Integrating DevOps management with the agile workflow helps in systematic software development. It includes the engagement and collaboration of the development team with the operations to release the product within the timelines.
3. Discover and Evaluate Challenges Individually
There are different types of problems faced by the organization that can be categorized into simple, complex, complicated, and chaotic. All these problems should be addressed timely to prevent the loss of time and resources. Quality assurance team if part of the product development lifecycle and their testing of the product is crucial. The product should be constantly tested during each phase of product development.
Implementing automation is the best solution as it will help in faster detection of the problem and also help in finding the solution to fix the issue. Automation will help in reducing the number of errors, increase efficiency, and improve employee satisfaction.
Implementing Agile and DevOps together helps the organization in rebuilding the services and it includes various features like the scalability of the software, service monitoring, deployment capabilities, setting alerts, logging, software testing, security, and compliance aspects, checking operational performances, etc.
4. Lead Across Cultures
The leaders should support the cultural changes in the organization as this will help in having enhanced communication across the business. The organization should encourage their employees for understanding and implement the agile and DevOps environment.
5. Continuous Optimization
Development is a continuous process as there is always a scope for improvement. There are chances of encountering new uncertainties and it is better to remain competitive. This required continuous optimization for the process, software products, tools, transformative efforts, etc. The organization needs to use the right tools for achieving the successful adoption of the Agile and DevOps process. Using the right infrastructure helps the developer in deploying the application on different platforms without added effort.
Automation of workflow is an important part of the integration of Agile and DevOps. It is essential to automate all the codes required for the scanning process for avoiding potential vulnerabilities. Automation leads to reducing errors and also helps in finding the solution to fix the errors.
Implementing the DevOps along with agile applications enables keeping the documentation of all the processes that is essential for a better understanding of the software releases.
Once the software is developed it is essential to keep the track of the process. Several metrics are used for measuring the effectiveness of the software. This helps in successfully enabling the release of the product for faster production. Some of the recommendations for the analysis of the product under the Scrum Alliance organization include checking the percentage of adherence to release date, percentage of increase in the number of releases, time is taken from release to production, defects attributable to support requirements, percentage of NFRs met, etc.
Conclusion
Digital transformation has become mandatory for all organizations and hasn’t been easy but challenging. Implementing the Agile and DevOps system helps the organization in enhancing its potential and also streamlines its performance to achieve its desired business goals. Implementing Agile and DevOps helps the organization's ineffective digital evolution by adopting several newer techniques like cloud computing and many others to enhance their performance.
