Agile Principles That Apply To DevOps

Introduction

DevOps is a new buzzword and it promotes continuous value delivery to the end users. To know more about DevOps read my article DevOps: What, why and how?

DevOps is a “culture”, where development, test, and operations work together in a collaborative manner to automate delivery of quality software. DevOps culture develops “production-first mindset;” i.e., applying DevOps ensures that your code is always ready to be deployed to production.

Agile Manifesto

Agile manifesto and principles have an influence on DevOps. Let’s review the Agile manifesto:

Manifesto for agile software development

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Agile Principles

Overall Agile Manifesto has twelve principles and four of those really gels well with DevOps.

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through an early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.

How Agile principles apply on DevOps

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through an early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  
  When a team adapts the DevOps culture then team works together to deliver a high-quality software to the end users consistently over and over.

• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  
  DevOps promotes short delivery cycles over long delivery cycles. Short delivery cycles have small amount of change which is far easier to deploy and test and detect impact of changes.
  
  
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  
  DevOps enable the business people to have look at the product early and provide candid feedback. DevOps also provides an easy and effective way of adding approval step in the CI/CD pipeline where business / product owner can approve changes for deployment to other environments.
  
  
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  
  At the end business values working software having reliable feature delivered on time to end users. DevOps practices enable the software development teams to deliver working software on time and provide proper channel for feedback between various stages of the DevOps workflow.