Undoubtedly, today’s world is under a technological wave with digital disruption that’s sweeping it all around and every enterprise and business irrespective of its size, needs quality products within a shorter time to generate a quicker return on investment (ROI). The way forward for businesses is to embrace the latest software development methodologies of Agile and DevOps to achieve faster and quality releases and achieve quicker ROI.
Agile Methodology Overview:
This methodology involves a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) of the project. In this iterative type of software development, both development and testing activities are taken care of concurrently. It involves individuals and interactions over processes and tools with complete customer collaboration responding to change over following a typical project plan.
It is a process in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between cross-functional teams. The highest priority of any software development methodology is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous releases, deliver working software, and ensure quality releases with shorter time intervals. The success of Agile results in organizations releasing software more quickly either with following scrum, extreme programming or Kanban or lean software development methods.
DevOps Methodology Overview:
DevOps is a simple extension of Agile methodology. It has been often stated that DevOps began when teams started extending agile principles to the infrastructure and more specifically to systems administration. Undoubtedly, Agile methodology has ultimately given rise to new processes and technology breakthroughs aimed at streamlining and automating the entire software delivery lifecycle through the advent of DevOps (Development & Operations).
DevOps stands out as a latest and most preferred methodology wherein developers and operation teams work in lieu with each other without any silos. This sort of uniform collaboration between teams ensures faster releases and quality deliverables ensured with continuous integration & continuous development (CI/CD model of DevOps being in place. The advent of continuous integration (CI) and the practice of checking code often, with each chunk being tested and integrated several times results in more frequent releases with ensuring underlying quality.
Even under the DevOps processes, some of the work in operations can be planned; releasing a big system change, moving between data centers, or performing system upgrades. But, much of the work of operations is unplanned; especially with performance spikes, system outages, and at times with compromised security. These are the specific events that demand immediate response wherein the operations teams work hand in hand with dev teams to solve them effectively. The major features of DevOps revolve around the process being holistic and collaborative in nature with automation at the forefront and ensures continual feedback loop of build, test, release, monitor, plan and execute. Interestingly, software development teams and the IT operations teams come together to ensure and pave way for faster and quality releases.
Thus, with an aim to support critical and strategic business needs, most of the software-driven organizations are evolving both these above processes and using in-house test automation frameworks and open source tools to transform their software delivery process to become more agile. Evidently, the tools and processes born out of this shift, such as release automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery tools, are now paramount to DevOps.
Last but not the least, current IT practices, to support effective and efficient software development has seen a great paradigm shift. Developer, QA and Operation teams are no more working in their relative siloes. They are being bridged with the implementation of Dev and Ops amalgamation to realize and generate great benefits to businesses.
Combined Benefits with Agile and DevOps Implementations:
- Quicker time to market
- Product owners get the right product to be built quickly with matching requirements
- Ensures improved productivity and efficiency
- Assures faster, quality and reliable releases
- Ensures improved customer satisfaction
- Agile processes promote sustainable development
- Customer satisfaction is ensured with rapid and continuous delivery of useful and well-featured software
- Quality working software is delivered at frequent intervals
- These two methods allow more feature flexibility and help in managing changing requirements effectively
Hence, in view of the enormous benefits with Agile and DevOps, businesses can take real advantage of them and adopt them in their software development to reap real-time benefits.
With digital disruption taking place in this competitive marketplace,the way forward for businesses is to embrace the latest software development methodologies of Agile and DevOps to achieve faster and quality releases and achieve quicker return on investment as development and operations teams work hand-in-hand to deliver desired results.
About Author: Shikha Jarial is a senior content writer with seven years of technical content writing and have been writing articles on trending IT related technology topics. In this article, I tried to share some important facts why businesses should embrace DevOps and agile implementations to achieve quality and faster releases and generate quicker ROI.
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