Understanding Agile DevOps

Organizations planning or undergoing Agile transformations today are more likely to adopt DevOps, instead. This is because DevOps is the next logical step for Agile. It is what Agile should be, or could be, and what most organizations need Agile to be.

This article assumes that you are familiar with Agile, and you want to understand how to translate Agile into DevOps concepts. Let’s look at how Agile and DevOps come together, and how your organization can build on investments in Agile development to successfully adopt DevOps.

What Does Agile Mean in DevOps?

When we talk about “Agile” in DevOps, we’re not talking about trying to use Scrum or Kanban methods in operations and support teams. Nor are we talking about embedding operations staff in Agile project teams and relabeling them as “DevOps.”

Agile in the context of DevOps is about extending Agile ideas and values from product management and software development to the rest of the service delivery organization. It’s about following Agile and Lean approaches across the full life cycle of a system, from planning and design to release, and to ongoing operations and maintenance and support. It’s about breaking work down so that it can be delivered incrementally and iteratively by small, collaborative and cross-functional teams; moving decision-making down so that these teams can respond more effectively to new information; continuously learning, adapting, and improving.

Agile methods like Scrum have helped ...