Agile enables DevOps

Agile reduces risks and WIPs (work-in-progress), increases collaboration and continuous delivery, allows requirements and designs to evolve. It promotes shipping of the viable product quickly to business. DevOps philosophy needs all of these - to increase the flow, continuous development and feedback.

Let us look at the key elements of Agile and how they help us with DevOps way of working.

Collaboration
Collaboration among stakeholders from different groups in the organizations - Agile insists on collaborative team work and proactive work ownership as against assigning tasks and monitoring progress. Various roles of Agile, product owner role, cross-functional teams, and the ScrumMaster - forces everyone to work collaboratively to achieve team goals.

Collaboration is key since Dev team should connect with the Ops teams to involve them appropriately and get inputs on challenges faced by Ops team. Sometimes, it is advised to rotate few team members from Dev to Ops and vice versa.

Sprints
iterative development through sprints - enables faster development and deployment of software components to production, identify issues up front by continuous testing, and integrate completed functionality. The shorter period sprints allows flexibility in design. Since things get validated in production environment, there are chances for improvising the design for scalability and robustness. This allows switching to an earlier version in case of a failure in Production, a significant increase in application up-time -- another notable point for DevOps strategy.

Automation
DevOps wants "continuous development, continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous integration" -- in other words, it promotes, "automate all of those that can be automated." And Agile forces you to do exactly the same.

Definition of Done
The DoD criteria needs to be defined in such a way that the functionality is shippable - it is not just limited to the completion of development. If Dev team knows about the production environment, DoD criteria becomes more accurate. This clearly promotes the need of DevOps.

Thus Agile implementation is a definite need for successful DevOps strategy.

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