DevOps is no longer a term used only at start-ups and ISVs. DevOps is making its way into enterprise IT organizations and is moving there fast. With CIOs and senior IT executives tasked to deliver greater business agility, IT teams are looking for new modes of execution that enforce agile development practices supported by a DevOps model.
Successful DevOps
To recognize the pillars to successful DevOps, you must first begin with a cultural transformation which includes the acceptance of fail fast, experiment with new technology, and focus on quality. Together with culture comes the implementation of the right tools to support a continuous delivery pipeline, sprint planning, shift left and greater automation.
With culture, people, processes and automation focused on shared goals, speed becomes the greatest benefit realized. In fact, according to Dzone’s 2018 Guide to Devops, “Speed is where the greatest value is seen: time to market, mean-time-to-resolution, feedback loops, getting new features to customers, and less development time.”
The Right DevOps and Continuous Delivery Tools
The DevOps toolchain is busy! There are 100s of tools all offering different execution modes, interfaces, and connectors. Knowing where to start can be confusing in this fragmented solution landscape. You need to look at the toolchain and understand what solutions offer coverage to each part of the DevOps cycle. For example, when beginning a project at the planning stage you need tools that enable traceability, collaboration and testable requirements. When looking at the verify stage you need test automation and test data while at the release stage you need a release deployment tool.
By bringing together the right tools for the different stages, you inherently create a continuous delivery model. Ideally, you will be able to do this with minimal tools for maximum coverage so that you don’t face the challenge of a fragmented CI/CD process.
A ”beginners guide” to Devops, Dzone’s 2018 Guide offers use cases and solution reviews for the latest DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Enterprise Agile Delivery tools to help you decide the right tools and process for your org. The guide also offers education on CD Anti-Patterns, DevOps measurements and Continuous Delivery case studies covering digital transformation (see page 67 for a Fortune 500 case study).
Why the Two, Agile and DevOps?
The State of Agile 2017 Agile at Scale report states that those organizations most successful at agile adoption are those IT organizations that implement a DevOps model alongside. “Agile without development and operations can’t succeed, just as DevOps without Agile won’t produce enough ROI. Together, they can significantly contribute to enterprise agility.”
What does this really mean? DevOps without an organizational agile transformation leads to poorer overall agility. Development and operations teams need to come together with shared goals, as a product first culture, so that they may be both proactive and reactive to change quickly without introducing greater risk.
Once the DevOps model is established and methodologies like “fail fast,” experiment with new, and quality-first are en-grained, agility can be executed and even further extended to a model of continuous delivery, a key factor of business agility.
Next steps from DevOps to Enterprise Agile Delivery
Enterprise Agile Delivery is the right combination of organizational culture, methodology and tools for a continuous, collaborative, transparent and seamless change delivery process using agility at scale. By scaling agile across the enterprise, organizations can manage application delivery and value streams of work, from ideation to realization. Managing and monitoring IT investment buckets that strategically align with overall business strategy, help IT teams optimize delivery pipelines so that they deliver their applications and services faster, better and safely.