DevOps building block: Agile

(light music) - In this chapter, we want to talk to you about some major concepts that are related to Dev Ops. Agile, lean, and itope. This video is abut Agile and it's relevance to Dev Ops. Patrick Dubois and Andrew Clayshafer were at the Agile 2008 Conference in Toronto. At the conference Andrew proposed a birds of the feather session on Agile infrastructure. Patrick was the only person to show up. - After they talked Andrew presented on Agile infrastructure at Velocity Conference the very next year.

- Then later in 2009, Patrick started a new, small open spaces base conference in his hometown of Ghent, Belgium. He called the conference Dev Ops Days, effectively coining the term Dev Ops and starting the Dev Ops movement. - I heard about it in January of 2010 at an event called Ops Camp in Austin that John Willis and Damon Edwards were running. Everyone was talking about this new thing called Dev Ops. - Since the history of Dev Ops is rooted in Agile let's talk about it quite a bit. - You might be familiar with Agile already.

The manifesto for Agile Software Development was written in 2001 by a group of software developers that were dissatisfied with the current state of software development. - They felt the increasing levels of bureaucracy and process were being layered onto projects in the hopes of more efficient results. - But often the outcome was the opposite. - That's right, yeah. The previous approach to software development is called Waterfall and that's because it moves software down from stage to stage. - First you get all the requirements completely done and documented, then you throw them over the wall to development, who codes them.

Then they throw it over the wall to QA who tests it and they then throw it over the wall to whoever does release engineering and then if it's a service it gets thrown over another wall to operations. - Eesh, that sounds painful. In Agile development the process is deliberately more iterative. - Right, instead of trying to complete each phase up front it stresses flexible collaboration between both workers and customers around frequent inner room deliverables of working software. This can quickly generate solutions that better address customer needs with fewer lingering quality problems.

- And Agile has proven its benefits. Version 1's 10th annual state of Agile survey reports that 85 percent of Agile teams have seen increased productivity. And 80 percent report faster time to market. - Critics of Agile assume that since it's faster and more collaborative, it must be sloppy and random. - Yeah, but actually we see that the reverse is true. Agile teams also report better delivery predictability in 81 percent of the cases and enhanced software quality in 79 percent of the cases.

- Learning about Agile is a major endeavor all to itself. The library has a large variety of courses that can help you learn more about Agile. - If you've read the principles in the Agile manifesto, however you'll see what's missing: any mention of operations. - Exactly, James. Agile talks about working software but it wasn't customary to bring system administrators into the product team. - Also the manifesto doesn't mention anything about the last part of the software delivery pipeline, where infrastructure is built and the apps are deployed and maintained in production.

- In fact, in the beginning Agile was seen as a threat by the infrastructure side of the house in IT organizations. I had to be convinced that it wasn't crazy by a development manager. And I was so convinced that I tried it out myself with my operations team and it worked great. Since then I've run a variety of ops and mixed Dev Ops teams using Agile and I would never go back. - So is Dev Ops exactly the same thing as Agile? - No you can practice Dev Ops without Agile and vice versa, but it can and frankly probably should be implemented as an extension of Agile since Dev Ops has such strong roots in Agile.

When I was asked to write a Dev Ops manifesto, after consideration I decided that very slight edits of the Agile manifesto capture the heart of it. Replace software with systems and add operations to the list of stakeholders and the result is a solid foundation to guide you in your Dev Ops journey. - As we'll see in our next video, Dev Ops isn't just an algorith of Agile. It owes a lot to Lean software.