DevOps and agility are terms that have been doing the rounds in the IT industry for some time now already. But what is it that drives this pursuit of ever more agility and closer interlacing of the fields of development and operations?
Companies, and in particular IT departments, want first and foremost to work more profitably, more efficiently and more reliably. That saves time, costs and in most cases also stress. At the same time, companies keep expecting ever better products and services ever more quickly. As a rule, teams work in "sprints" of two to four weeks.
This means that new application features or software can be delivered fast as a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) – a clear competitive advantage. But this commercial goal means that a fundamental change of culture is required in IT.
The focus is on how the cooperation works. The two methods – agile software development and DevOps – define a new kind of team culture, collaboration and error tolerance, and thus transform entire company cultures.
No DevOps without agile software development – no agility without DevOps.
The agility model and the DevOps concept have completely different core focuses, and what they can do for teams doesn't show until you combine the two. The idea of agile software development was laid down in 2001 in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and it defines four main principles:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
At ConSol we have been using agile methods in our work for some years now, and we have established DevOps both as a method and as its own company unit. Our customers want to respond quickly to market demands with their business. We give them exactly what is needed from the IT lifecycle – expertly, quickly and with the highest demands on quality.
Find out more about agile software development and DevOps at ConSol here:
Minimize Project Risk by Being Agile
With these requirements, software developers leave the traditional, linear waterfall approach behind them and instead choose an iterative methodology. Customers and project supervisors are networked together and give each other regular feedback on the project status at short intervals. New code is tested immediately, so there are results available on a weekly or even daily basis, and new or modified customer requirements can be integrated into the workflow without delay. The Scrum and Kanban procedural models are a key component in iterative and incremental software development.
DevOps: Everyone is Interconnected
One could say that DevOps perfects the concept of agile software development, or at least that it takes it a step further. The teams work closely together and discuss from the beginning what Dev can do for Ops and what Ops needs from Dev in order to subsequently transition with the software product into stable productive operation. The automating of processes during application development is another feature of DevOps. Using CI/CD pipelines, development cycles are largely automated in order to accelerate product delivery. Ideally there is a mixed Development/Operations team to ensure interdisciplinary workflows. At the same time, DevOps aims to integrate all stakeholders into a project from the word go: alongside Dev and Ops, this also includes Testing, Quality Assurance, Security of course the customer itself.
From DevOps to DevSecOps
In particular the shift in IT toward the Cloud has brought up questions about security in recent years. It makes perfect sense to have the security team also play an active role in the lifecycle of an app, so the term DevSecOps is simply to be seen as a further evolution of the concept, which also includes the topic of cybersecurity.
OUR CUSTOMERS
ConSol Papers & IT-Trends
You want to dig even deeper into the world of digital transformation? You are interested in the digitalization of business processes and our IT topics of software architecture, Cloud, DevOps, test automation etcetera? Then download our guideline and get the information you need for your business.
