Atabak - Digital Transformation with Agile + DevOps Culture

Digital Transformation with Agile + DevOps Culture

Waterfall is dead, and traditional software development lifecycle (SDLC) won’t support rapid development. Clients expect quick turnaround on products specially within enterprise level and technologies like cloud changed expectations. Agile speed up the delivery rate of the product and more releases that are smaller in size. Each release has multiple short sprints, then you will receive quick information from client feedback.

Agile is a good start, Getting close, but we can get quicker, and need to focus on nondevelopment activities accordingly.

Devops brings groups together, No more separated teams, and it Will typically include an agile-type approach to development. Therefore, not only does development move quickly, so the entire release; plus, empower teams to closely define, develop, and release the product.

DevOps is a large culture change. It requires a skilled team, not all tester can code; not all coders can admin Linux. Everything needs to happen quickly. Automation in an existing environment is usually a lacking and security is not immune to the effects of DevOps

Enterprise DevOps: At enterprise scale, everything becomes more difficult. Changing a culture which has been created unconsciously over the years would be the most critical part.

Many vendors and stakeholders are involved, and they are incentive to worry about, different vendor contracts. All in different timeline and value add. Therefore, we should learn that, to change the culture need to work in many elements, and it is not possible just by announcing a new principles and values like cost, communication or new agreements. Indeed, it needs to work on process and behaviors as well.

Laloux’s Model If you have a look on Laloux’s model you will find 5 colors or development styles:

Red: it powered by individual
Amber: it is the typical command and control hierarchies (similar to the militaries)
Orange: competition of success is the underlive driver
Green: focusing on the empowerment of the employees, a focus shift from shareholders to stakeholders (family business)
Teal: A culture of full served organization, very much like a living organism

Most of the organizations have people and organization that it is more closed to Amber and Orange culture. Migrating from amber to orange would be main issue across team, so it is best practice to focus on master orange and then automate everything (like deployment process) rather than achieve to green directly. And then empowering the team members to decide how to deploy, when to deploy and how improve the process continuously in a GREEN culture.

The culture is the significant key of the journey. So, it drives us in a try and error until found own culture and roadmap. Indeed, to be successful in DevOps enterprise level we need to think about 3 main dimensions such as:

Technology
People and Process
Ecosystem

Technology dimensions

Cover Test automation
Adaptation of Cloud technologies
Break up application architecture into more service-based architectures
Speed is dependent on agility

People and Process Dimensions

Find evolving orchestration that works in our organization
Reliable Deployment
Quickly Validated
Reversible
Replace an approval with a notification

Ecosystem Dimension

Technology vendors
Service Providers

But it was always main challenge to define the best Key indicators in an enterprise level. Many vendors and stakeholders will always make it important to find the bottlenecks and define the KPI based on efficient Cost and Times. Use a KPI to evaluate the progress:

Mean time to recover
Deployment cycle time
Deployment failure rate

Transforming is a continual process, As long as the business results is improved and getting better, we are on track.

Continuous Improvement (Checklist Activity)

Identify
Track
Plan: Define right measures
Act: Discipline and Flexibility

Tip: We need to rethink about the process to decrease defects. Each improvement is an experiment that we hope will positively influence the capabilities, but it might not always work out in our favor.

Improvement Cycle Template

We believe "this capability"
Will result in "that outcome"
We will know we have succeeded when " we see a measurable signal"

In conclusion, by merging DevOps into Agile technology, we will not only gain the benefits internally, but our customers would achieve significant metrics:

Speed:

Innovate for customers faster
Adapt to changing markets better
Grow more efficient at driving business results.

The DevOps model enables your developers and operations teams to achieve these results. For example, microservices architecture and continuous delivery let teams take ownership of services and then release updates quicker and frequently.

Rapid Delivery:

Innovate and improve the product faster
The quicker we can release new features and fix bugs, the faster we can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.

Reliability:

Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes
maintaining a positive experience for end users.

Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help you stay informed of performance in real-time.

Improved Collaboration:

Build more effective teams under a DevOps cultural model
Emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability.
Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows.

This reduces inefficiencies and saves time (e.g., reduced handover periods between developers and operations, writing code that takes into environment account in which it is run).

Security:

Move quickly while retaining control and preserving compliance

Adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques. For example, using infrastructure as code and policy as code, you can define and then track compliance at scale.