From the course: DevOps Foundations (2016)

DevOps building block: Agile

From the course: DevOps Foundations (2016)

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DevOps building block: Agile

- In this chapter, we want to talk to you about some major concepts that are related to DevOps. Agile, Lean, and ITIL. This video is about Agile and its relevance to DevOps. - Patrick Dubois and Andrew Clay Shafer were at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. At that conference, Andrew proposed a Birds-of-a-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 this new, small, open spaces based conference in his hometown of Ghent, Belgium. He called the conference DevOps Days, effectively coining the term DevOps and starting the DevOps movement. - I heard about it in January of 2010 at an event called Ops Camp in Austin, that John Willis and Demon Edwards were running. Everyone was talking about this new thing called, DevOps. - [James] Since the history of DevOps is rooted in Agile, let's talk about it quite a bit. - [Male 1] 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. - [James] They felt the increasing levels of bureaucracy and process were being layered onto projects in the hopes of more efficient results. - [Male 1] But often the outcome was the opposite. - [James] 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. - [Male 1] 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, gets thrown over another wall to operations. - [James] Yeesh, that sounds painful. In agile development the process is deliberately more iterative. - [Male 1] Right. Instead of trying to complete each phase upfront, it stresses flexible collaboration between both workers and customers around frequent interim 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. - [James] VERSIONONE's 10th Annual State of Agile Survey reports that 85% of Agile teams have seen increase productivity. And 80% 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% of the cases, and enhanced software quality in 79% 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 operation. - 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's 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 DevOps teams using Agile and I would never go back. - So, is DevOps exactly the same thing as Agile? - No, you can practice DevOps without Agile and vice versa but it can, and frankly probably should be implemented as an extension of Agile since DevOps has such strong roots in Agile. When I was asked to write a DevOps manifesto, after consideration, I decided that very slight edits of the Agile Manifesto capture the heart of it. Replaced software with systems and add operations to the list of stakeholders. And the result is a solid foundation to guide you in your DevOps journey. - As we'll see in our next video, DevOps isn't just an outgrowth of Agile, it owes a lot to lean software.

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