Companies and development teams approaching DevOps often struggle to come to grips with all of the moving parts of full-featured DevOps. DevOps depends on a large number of team and individual skills, cultural norms, technologies, and business processes that are often foreign to organizations approaching DevOps for the first time. The learning curve is daunting.
On the bright side, almost all of the fundamentals on which DevOps is based can be adopted independently and can immediately provide value to the person, team, or organization that adopts them. One of these fundamentals is agile practice.
Adopting an agile practice is something we have coached our customers on for years at Mindset. On our projects we run Scrum, but I think every organization should choose a methodology that works for you. Personally, I like a Kanban-based process for a company that is maintaining and improving technology over a long period of time.
Regardless of what approach you choose and whether you choose the approach at the level of a single developer, a team, or a whole development organization, you can see some immediate benefits from committing to an agile practice. Even a single developer adopting Kanban can start to get a better handle on their workload and feel more control over the process of development. This change translates into clearer reporting to management and, over time, better ability to project completion, less dropped issues, improved self-management, and closer engagement with actual user issues. Similar benefits can be realized at the team and organization levels, helping devolve decision-making further down the hierarchy in a controlled manner while maintaining transparency to management.
At Mindset, we have Scrum masters and agile process experts who specialize in leading teams in these types of transformations. From my perspective as head of our DevOps solutions, adoption of some sort of agile or agile-inspired practice is a fundamental building-block of DevOps practice and is something that I recommend in that context. But as described above, agile practice is worth pursuing whether or not your organization intends to pursue DevOps as a strategy.
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