DevOps and Agile: How They Interrelate?

We can broadly classify the benefits of agile methodologies under three different headings:

Effective Teamwork: 

Agile promotes effective teamwork through the following aspects:

a) Collaboration

Agile promotes an environment of frequent communication and collaboration among team members by giving them a platform to brainstorm, share ideas, resolve issues, and work towards a common goal at the same time.

b) Self-organization

Agile emphasises on taking ownership and responsibility for work. This leads to self accountability, thereby resulting in higher productivity, engagement and satisfaction.

c) Cross-functional teams

Agile requires members from different teams with varying expertise to work closely with each other. This diversity enables teams to understand and solve problems better. Also, this results in knowledge sharing between the teams.

Customer satisfaction: 

Agile promotes customer satisfaction in the following ways:

• Continuous Customer Collaboration

In Agile, the sprint happens frequently, in every 2-4 weeks. This results in frequent collaboration, product demos, and regular feedback from the clients. Agile ensures that the final product aligns with customer expectations.

• Faster delivery

Agile emphasises on working in small and regular sprints or iterations. By doing so, it becomes easy to incorporate customer feedback into every stage of the SDLC and ensure a faster delivery of the end product.

• Flexibility to change

Agile methodologies align closely with the evolving needs of the customers, and changes are incorporated at every stage. This ensures that, even with multiple change requests, the final product aligns closely with customer expectations.

Continuous Improvement

One of the major benefits of agile is continuous improvement, it helps in the following benefits:

1. Faster Feedback Cycles 

Faster feedback is an essential part of the agile process. It helps teams identify and address potential issues early in the development cycle. This reduces the cost of potential errors and customer complaints in the future.

• Learning & Growth

Agile provides everyone on the team with the perfect environment to grow and learn. The continuous feedback loop and the multiple sprints, along with working with cross-functional teams, provide everyone time to adapt, learn, retrospect, and grow with time.

Considering the number of benefits of the agile process, now the framework is used beyond software development like marketing, product development, and project management, where iterative development, continuous improvement, and adaptive planning is required.

Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming are widely used to implement agile methodologies. 

Companies who have embraced agile have shown better performance, collaboration, engagement, adaption, flexibility to change, and better customer satisfaction. According to Zippa, almost 71% of companies in the US are using agile.

Now let us look at what DevOps is and its importance in the software industry.