2019: A Year the Agile and DevOps Community Will Remember

During the holiday season, it is natural to reflect on the past year. We have been doing that, as have all of us at CollabNet VersionOne. 2019 is easily a year we’ll all remember. Why? If you look back at 2019, you’ll see it is the year that three powerful interdependent trends became major topics of interest across our entire extended community – everyone that Agile and DevOps touches.

First, 2019 showed us just how mainstream Agile and DevOps have become. It is also the year that the concepts of Business Agility enabled by enterprise Agile and DevOps took off. And, finally, the year marks the rise of Value Stream Management (VSM) taking its rightful place in the software and business world’s cultural zeitgeist — after several years of marinating in thought-leadership, it was widely accepted as essential in 2019. Those are all significant breakthroughs for the world of Agile, DevOps, software development, and business in general because they will enable the next era of Digital Transformation, in which software will drive everything.

There is a lot to support 2019 as a trend establishing year. That trifecta of trends was discussed at large and small industry events we attended: DevOps Days around the country, CapGemini DevOps Series, Red Hat Summit, Agile in Government, Global SAFe Summit, DOES, automotive and defense industry event Realize LIVE, RTE Summit, and the Southern Fried Agile community run event.

What’s more, Frameworks became a hot topic this year as they are essential for Agile at scale. This year’s Gartner’s Market Guide for Enterprise Agile Frameworks shows just how far they have come.  CollabNet VersionOne supports many enterprise Agile frameworks, but among them SAFe^® got a lot of buzz this year, as it enables Agile and DevOps at scale for many industries. The latest talk is about SAFe 5.0, which directly addresses the three trends established this year.

Industry publications and analysts covered these trends in 2019. At the beginning of the year, industry leading publication, SD Times declared 2019 the year of the Value Stream. Our own Eric Robertson was interviewed for their recent piece reflecting on that declaration – read it here. They noted that in 2019 many companies jumped on value stream. Forrester established one of their signature Wave analyses for VSM about a year ago, and in 2019 as the topic took off their VSM research and tracking was appreciated and discussed widely in the industry. Also, addition to frameworks, we saw reports from Gartner expanding on topics such as leaders in platforms for enterprise Agile.

From an inside perspective, our own Ask an Agile Expert Q&A had an incredibly high attendance, and many of the questions were around these three topics. Attendees were not just Agile practitioners or DevOps experts, but there were many application administrators, functional area leaders and others exploring enterprise Agile.

Also, the annual State of Agile survey, the longest and largest running agile survey in the world, validated these trends.  A few key findings from this year’s report, The 13th annual State of Agile report revealed three insights supporting what we saw in 2019:

• DevOps is a higher organizational priority – The need to understand and improve DevOps continues to rise as a priority for organizations — with 90 percent of respondents citing it as important.
• Value Stream Management is new, but important – value stream management grabbed headlines this year and 67 percent of respondents reported that it was important for connecting the business to its software delivery capability.
• SAFe dominates scaling methods – The Scaled Agile Framework^® (SAFe) continues to grow in adoption and was identified as the scaling method of choice by 30 percent of respondents.

Here are links to resources that explore Agile and DevOps at Enterprise Scale, the relationship to Business Agility and Value Stream Management. They are easy to follow and will give you a firm basis on the trends and thought leadership in our industry: Papers,  Blogs, Webinars, Articles

We are also proud that our company has been a thought leader for years on each of those trends. We’ve received recognition through industry awards this year for our products. So, let us close on a more product specific note. We kept up our regular release cadence and some feature highlights to VersionOne are improvements to PlanningRooms, TeamRooms, Story Boards, and Portfolio Kanbans. Here are all of this year’s release notes:

• Winter 2019 Release
• Spring 2019 Release
• Summer 2019 Release
• Fall 2019 Release

We became a part of the TPG Capital family of companies in 2019, which will support us in investing and developing into these trends. We’ll enrich our product portfolio and keep a focus on innovation and thought leadership as the world moves forward into the next era of Digital Transformation! See you in 2020!