5 Benefits of DevOps In Agile Development by Chatty Garrate
Today's successful tech organizations rely heavily on Agile and DevOps practices. The value that this hybrid approach is often overlooked. But early adopters of these methodologies are leading and disrupting their respective industries.
Uber, for example, has become the most prominent transportation system without actually owning any vehicles. Netflix, on the other hand, has overthrown its huge competitors in the movie rental sector without having physical locations. More and more companies embrace the changes and benefits of using Agile and DevOps in their development process. This article explains why DevOps is a perfect fit in Agile development.
What are DevOps and Agile Development?
DevOps is a practice that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to increase the company's ability to deliver services quickly. The way to do this is to promote clear lines of communication and collaboration. Improved relationships between the development and operations team are one of the advantages of implementing a DevOps team.
Meanwhile, Agile is a mindset informed by the Agile Manifesto's values and principles. In a nutshell, Agile prioritizes individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responsiveness to change. These guiding values aim to deliver work and progress in small but consumable increments.
Benefits of DevOps in Agile development
Let's take a closer look at the main advantages of adopting DevOps in Agile development.
1. Focusing on user’s needs
Agile development enhances the value of products and services by concentrating on the genuine demands of customers. To capture genuine market needs, it uses increased communication and engagement with customers and their representatives. Agile requests feedback to get the product right. With DevOps continuously integrating the build and test system, we can keep customers' needs in mind across both the developmental and operational departments. Many release-time issues caused by the incongruent visions of the development department and operations department will be resolved. Furthermore, having the software's functionality validated by the operations department will lead to fewer last-minute glitches and more value to users.
2. Creating continuous value
Agile ensures that the company's software can be delivered on a regular basis, with the software being tweaked and developed in response to user behavior. We get fewer outbound releases due to the protracted process of having these patches or updates tested in multiple environments. DevOps is able to solve this issue by creating product maps and pipelines that help set up enough checks, tests, and automated integrations each time there is a new build There are also some feedback loops set up for monitoring activities by some of the most well-known companies Due to speedy deployment and automated updates, DevOps gets a lot more done at the conclusion of each build.
3. Increasing productivity
In a typical IT setting, there is a lot of waste since workers are either waiting for other people or machines, or they are stuck tackling the same problems over and over again. Workers want to be productive, and wasting time is a source of dissatisfaction and frustration. With the help of automated deployments and standardized production environments, DevOps' critical aspects in IT operations make deployments predictable and release people from routine, repetitive tasks to do more high-value jobs. The company is able to get rid of the unsatisfying parts of workers’ jobs with automation and this ultimately adds value to the organization. Everyone is motivated and more productive due to having more tasks accomplished.
4. Enhancing testing and analysis
Quality analysis (QA) is an essential part of the development lifecycle. QA is another vital factor when combining Agile and DevOps. In this case, testing is critical in bringing the two techniques together. Despite the fact that functional testing is done in Agile, DevOps requires software to be tested for performance and load to ensure that it is of high quality. Testing requirements and documentation processes of DevOps would improve the quality of products and services in every phase.
5. Improving collaboration
DevOps talks about setting up a culture of inclusion. This is accomplished by involving the software team's operations and IT specialists in order to emphasize the user's demands from an operational aspect right from the start. In a way, the Business Analyst, the Developer, the Tester, and the Operations guy work on every user story or feature. They’ll be able to discuss the needs from a system point of view, the resources needed, environments to be set up, the list of dependencies to be maintained, and so on. The goal is to look at all parts of the software development process and not leave any team out.
Conclusion
The combination of DevOps and Agile leads to the development of better software that reaches the end customers quickly. DevOps complements Agile in focusing on user needs, creating continuous value, increasing productivity, enhancing testing and analysis, and improving collaboration.
Written by Chatty Garrate
