Enabling Business With Agile and DevOps

“A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.”

Disruptive innovations create products which perform badly in the near term but ultimately change the industry and create a new value network of products and services around itself. The best example of a disruptive innovation is iPad by Apple, which created an entire new market.

In the same vein it is completely reasonable to say that Agile methodologies are also a part of disruptive innovation in the field of software development, creating new value network and improving the service. It takes the traditional waterfall approach to software development to a different level. Agile defines new set of methodologies through iterative approach to software development and brings in improved developer productivity and better software quality. It is even said to bring hyper-productivity in some teams.

Agile methodologies are said to fix the problems that arise out of software development life-cycle (SDLC) between the customer and the developers. For instance, it is next to impossible to collect all the information regarding the application to be developed right at the beginning. There is a big element of uncertainty at the customer’s end too because of which the customers (or stakeholders) need their vendors (or in-house developers) to be ready to incorporate changes rapidly into the software design. It is therefore imperative that there is a continuous customer engagement and at the same time it is important that the developers adopt changes rapidly. For this developers need to have flexibility incorporated in the SDLC and Agile methodologies bridge this gap.

The whole concept of Agile is based on the fundamentals of collaborative self-organizing and cross-functional teams throughout the organization. If there is any disconnect between the teams involved, then Agile’s vision of accelerated delivery gets defeated. When you talk about operations side of the software development life-cycle, then this disconnect is often felt and this leads to the slowdown of agile processes, as the operations team is unable to cope up with the continuous deployment cycles required out of sprint-approach to software engineering. (A better explanation is given in 5 Steps on How to Achieve Hyper-productivity in a Team).

Here comes the growing need for DevOps. DevOps can be understood as a bridge between the developer teams and the operations team of the SDLC. Under the traditional approach, the development team writes the best of code and hands it over to the operations team to deploy. Often the code does not perform as per the expectations either because of infrastructure issues, lack of version support or architecture mismatch or simply because of lack of continuous collaboration between the development and operations teams, which leads to issues in reporting, security, back-up and provisioning.

DevOps try to solve this problem and avoid failure of the codes at the deployment stage. It aims to provide framework for fostering cooperation, learning and co-ordination between development and operations group in order to bring in more efficiency. DevOps environment helps system administrators and developers to build relationships, processes and tools that help them to collaborate better. DevOps models especially benefit processes like automation, capacity planning, back-up & recovery, security and provisioning as it improves the quality of interactions between the development and operations teams.

Due to some crucial technology trends and a foreseeable paradigm shift towards developer platforms, adopting Agile ALMs will become a necessity with many organizations. It will be easier for the SMEs and other micro organizations to adopt the Agile ALMs in the cloud. But the ‘disconnect’ between the development and operations will still be felt and they too will need the DevOps to run Agile effectively. In fact the SMEs will create a demand for DevOp tools which are integrated with other Hosted Agile ALM tools or at least be interoperable so that they do not increase the cost factor significantly.

Large enterprises who have their own customized IT stack, may find a stronger need for scalable and robust DevOps with the option to choose from cloud model or on-premise traditional model.

What is your opinion on demand growth for DevOps?