DevOps is natural evolution of Agile development

IBM InterConnect had a lot of DevOps elements, but the event is much broader than just DevOps. However, some sessions end up being related to DevOps without ever mentioning the term or even alluding to it.

One session I attended focused entirely on Agile development, but what struck me most were the similarities between Agile principles and DevOps. I wrote this blog post examining the parallels:

IBM held its InterConnect 2015 conference last week in Las Vegas. The event covered on a range of topics including hybrid cloud, mobile apps, and DevOps. One session I attended focused on Agile development and the parallels to DevOps were apparent.

The session I attended at the Mandalay Bay Hotel was titled “How a Major Telco Improved Cycle Time and Business Results by Leveraging Agile”. Elliot Olschwang and Claudio Cozzi—both IBM employees—talked about helping a specific customer reach its goals by introducing Agile development principles. What struck me throughout the presentation were the many ways that the concepts the two talked about implementing at a developer level for this customer are very similar to the concepts companies must embrace on an organizational level to make the transition to DevOps.

Rosalind Radcliffe actually deserves credit for pointing out the similarities to me. When I spoke to her a few weeks ago she told me that DevOps is just the Agile principle taken to the full enterprise. It provides a more comprehensive end-to-end perspective that enables enterprise-scale transformation.

Agile development was an evolution from the Waterfall method. The Waterfall methods treats project analysis, design, coding and testing as separate and distinct phases that have to occur in order. There are many inherent problems with Waterfall, such as the fact that you don’t actually develop code until half way through the project. Testing would often be cut in the interest of time, and even if testing is done it’s actually too late. Any issues identified in testing mean you have to go back at least to the coding phase again—possibly back to design or even analysis.

Agile removed the linear dependencies of Waterfall to enable development to occur more effectively and efficiently. Aside from imposing a more efficient workflow in general, Agile improves quality because testing occurs earlier in the process and more frequently throughout the process. Subsequently the risk to the project is reduced because there is continuous feedback that enables developers to adjust on the fly rather than having to go back to the proverbial drawing board at the end of the project lifecycle.

DevOps is just a natural extension of Agile. It takes the guiding principles and best practices that Agile brought to developers and applies them on a much broader scale across the organization. As I pointed out in a previous article from IBM InterConnect, “Removing some of the friction between different groups and enabling the organization to function more effectively is one of the primary benefits of DevOps.”

Read the full story at DevOps.com: DevOps is Agile for the rest of the company.