Agile or DevOps on Its own Is not enough

As every company becomes a software company, it becomes increasingly important to meet customer demands faster and better than the competition. Many companies have turned to agile or DevOps as part of their digital transformation efforts to improve software development productivity, delivery efficiency and overall quality. However, they aren’t seeing the benefits they had expected. 

Why adopt agile? 

Agile is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies, the most popular of which include Scrum, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), Lean Software Development, and Extreme Programming (XP). While each agile methodology is unique, they are all built upon a common vision and core values (see the Agile Manifesto). These methodologies all rely upon iteration and continuous feedback to successfully refine and reprioritize work in order to deliver greater software value faster.  

Agile methodologies empower people to collaborate so that they can quickly and efficiently make decisions together. And so, Development and Quality Assurance teams adopt agile methods with the goal of breaking down walls between teams so they can deliver better software faster and with lower costs. 

Why adopt DevOps? 

DevOps provides an IT mindset that encourages communication, collaboration, integration, and automation between software developers and IT operations in order to improve the frequency, quality, and reliability of delivering software. 

DevOps teams focus on standardizing and automating delivery processes to improve predictability, reliability, efficiency, governance, and maintainability. DevOps provides that smooth “highway” for delivering software by removing manual processes, gathering data, and increasing visibility across the entire software delivery lifecycle. DevOps encourages empowering teams with the autonomy to build, validate, deliver, and support their own applications. With DevOps, nothing gets “thrown over the wall”. 

Agile or DevOps on Their Own is Not Enough  

According to “The Modern Application Delivery Playbook for 2021” by Forrester, a critical component to digital transformation success is the practicing agile and DevOps together.  

Since agile improves the ability of Development teams to deliver the highest-value features quickly while improving their ability to adjust to the needs of the market. DevOps enables Release teams to deliver applications more frequently and with higher reliability. Bringing agile and DevOps together ensures software delivery processes can support the speed of development, and vice versa. 

A recent Intelligent CIO article, highlights how Schneider began their digital transformation by initially adopting agile development practices, but continued to experience delays delivering software. By adding DevOps to their agile practices, Schneider eliminated manual handoffs between teams, automated common workflows and gained visibility into processes so they could measure performance, locate bottlenecks, and identify areas for improvement. Ultimately, agile with DevOps has helped Schneider deliver software faster with fewer hurdles, providing better value to the business. 

To learn more about why agile or DevOps alone isn’t enough, join us for a webinar on Tuesday, May 4 at 1pm EST. We are excited to have special guest Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst at Forrester, joining us to discuss: 

• How bringing agile and DevOps together lets organizations better align software processes with business goals, deliver higher-quality software, and improve release frequency 
• Common problems companies face with their agile and DevOps transformations and techniques for success 
• How combining agile + DevOps leads to greater flexibility, increased efficiency, and improved customer experience 
• Key metrics to track and improve application development and delivery performance 

Sign up now and join us to learn how agile and DevOps are better together.