Can DevOps and Agile Be Combined?

Current trends in the software industry tend to make application development and deployment an important part of business operations. These companies began to implement methods like DevOps solutions, which helped shorten product development time. Development with DevOps reduces the stages required to deliver the software. The short software delivery time allows users to deploy the software as early as possible and add value to the business with more feedback.

Combination of DevOps and Agile 

The implementation of DevOps focuses on various aspects of the software, such as focusing on the operability of the software, automation of the software processes, scalability, and better deployment of each version and its monitoring and long-term maintenance. The disadvantage of DevOps is that it cannot support continuous testing of code supported in agile development. Unlike DevOps, agile mainly focuses on whether products meet customers' needs, focusing on strict testing.

Instead of using DevOps and Agile alone for development, combine them as a force to absorb their strengths and thus benefit the software industry. This can be achieved by working the agile sprints with the integrated team provided by DevOps. Therefore, combining DevOps and agile methods in software development is a crucial requirement for increased productivity and delivery of high-quality software products. This approach can optimize the incremental development of the software and its maintenance.

Advantages of Combining DevOps and Agility 

• Creates a model for the release process and increases product value. 
• Allow for better collaboration. 
• Reduce the risk of publishing versions. 
• Faster to address errors and fix bugs. 
• Increase transparency 
• Product quality is improved to meet user expectations.

Issues to be Considered in the Combination of DevOps and Agile 

To avoid obstacles, let's look at the challenges posed to the smooth combination of DevOps and agile development and achieving higher productivity.

1. Establish a Good and Harmonious Relationship with the Internal Team to Ensure a Smooth Workflow

Team members should understand how to use DevOps and agile development methods together, broaden their horizons, find ways to make full use of them without causing conflict, and increase the business value of software. Team members should focus on the development cycle and software maintenance, operability, and delivery. The team should be experienced and know each version, service, adaptation to changes, managing changes, and tool automation.

2. Overview of the Life Cycle

With the integration of DevOps and agile, teams are now concerned with operations throughout the development lifecycle. Therefore, an appropriate development life cycle should be formulated to improve consistency, minimize development time, provide comprehensive testing for each version, and speed up the process of product delivery. The development lifecycle should include the DevOps approach early in the development phase.

3. Adjust the DevOps for the Sprint

Agile methods divide the development process into sprints, but now it's time to devise a strategy to properly include DevOps in sprints based on the specifics of the team.

Follow these Guidelines in the Sprint to Integrate the DevOps

• When planning sprint, seek the opinions of operation and support personnel and incorporate them into the plan. 
• Consider the features, functions, and operations of the product simultaneously. 
• DevOps should be considered in the next sprint stage. 
• Try to involve the DevOps team in Dcrum's agile development processes such as daily station meetings, planning meetings, and review meetings.

Include Quality Assurance

Agile includes continuous testing and integration for each version, but it does not provide performance and load tests beyond functional testing, which DevOps needs. So these tests should be included for each version. So the QA should be included in every stage of the development.

Execute To-Do List Under DevOps

During the collaboration, when building a to-do list under the framework of DevOps, we need to consider: software scalability, monitoring service, deployment capability, logging, alarm setting, test software, security issues, and operational efficiency.

Equipment Automation

Workflow automation is an important part of bringing DevOps and agile methods together. To avoid potential vulnerabilities, automate all coding processes.

Provide Documentation

Agile methods are not obsessed with documentation; instead, they focus on development, while DevOps documented software version design and other specifications. Therefore, the provision of documents is still indispensable.

ZenTao DevOps Solution

ZenTao project management software based on agile development methodology Scrum provides DevOps solutions that help plan and integrate DevOps and agile.

ZenTao's support for DevOps and continuous integration includes several aspects of Git, Subversion version system integration, Jenkins build task triggering and ZTF automated test scheduling. ZTF automated testing tool developed by ZenTao can well drive 8 unit test frameworks to perform the test and pass the final results back to Zentao for a unified report presentation. The ZTF opens up the gap between project management and continuous integration tools, running through the different stages of the DevOps life cycle, such as continuous integration, testing, and deployment.

ZenTao provides you with professional DevOps solutions.