Agile and DevOps cooperates with each other to deliver the product through an excellent environment faster. But what DevOps regularly do? And what is DevOps in the first place? Well, there is an answer: DevOps (development and operations) is an enterprise software development phrase used to mean a type of agile relationship between Development and IT Operations.
So, in tech companies DevOps are responsible for ensuring the interface within IT and business user. Basically, DevOps is the group of people that assures so-called “end user” with a first level communication point; moreover, DevOps take the so-called “deployables” of the Development team and transfer them to production.
DevOps team must be flexible and must assure efficiency. Often, when the Dev team delivers the “deliverable”, the functional requirements were perfectly described. But what about deployment and support requirements? Well, it often happens that they are not documented. This results in surprises during application deployment.
Within Agile, Dev Team delivers software product by the each week sprint’s end. But at the same time, DevOps team must be fully ready to deploy the product on the same day it was delivered by the development team. So if the operational team face some kind of an issue during the deployment, or in other words, the team is not ready to provide the deployment in a brief timeline… There will be some kind of a disaster for business. Because the main thing for all businesses is time-to-market. And when there is a delay in the time-to-market, and delay is caused by DevOps team, then maybe it’s time to think about scaling Agile methodology on IT Operations as well.
So what is the main key to open Agile methodology scaling on DevOps team? The answer is that simple – and it is “involvement”.
That means – DevOps team should participate on every meeting Development team has. The DevOps team should also have an access to the business vision of the product to make it sure that the best possible deployment option is applied. The DevOps team should be engaged with deadlines and sprint “start-finish” dates. Moreover, DevOps team should have an ability to provide their input to the developers on a development stage.
Also some person from the DevOps should communicate IT non-functional requirements to the actual/formal product owner. Those requirements should cover such areas as deployment, support, and vendor platforms.