by
Laurent Charles
Continuous integration Developer Devops IT

The promise behind agile approaches is to provide greater value within shorter time frames. In other words, to increase ROI by delivering the most important things first, those that bring the most value.

But the value is only delivered when it is in production, when it is in the hands of actual users. This is why it is important to connect the “development” team with the “deployment” IT team.

But don’t fall into the trap to focus only on fast delivery. Remember, the aim is to deliver value. To not forget this key element. Learn why DevOps should be used with Scrum or Kanban.

Value delivery is in production

DevOps Open source tool

When we say “in production” what we really mean is that a development is running on the hardware, on the servers, or on the desktop—not on the shelves or in the download repositories.

This is why it is so important to bring the “ops” people—who are responsible for delivering a service in the “real” world—into the development chain.

DevOps solves a challenge I have encountered when implementing software engineering solutions in that it connects Build and Run , in the ITIL sense of the terms. If you are interested in DevOps, you already know this. You are probably also well aware of all the virtues of uniting people with sometimes-conflicting objectives in a single team; of bringing the meaning, the “why”, the business reason, to ops. And bringing the SLA, the “how”, to user representatives.

DevOps to be used with Scrum or Kanban

In theory, yes! In practice—at least what we have noticed in most DevOps implementations—DevOps approaches are successful at connecting developers to operations and at accelerating the ability to bring code to production (thus accelerating the delivery of value). In other words, DevOps is amazingly efficient at accelerating the delivery of code.

However, because DevOps approaches are often driven by development processes and/or tools (because DevOps is implemented by developers or ops people), we have also noticed that people tend to forget that DevOps is an agile approach and that it is an important link in the value-delivery chain. In other words, DevOps is another agile “layer” to be used with Scrum or Kanban.

The conventional wisdom says that any project managed with Scrum or Kanban is an agile project. However, tools like Scrum and Kanban can only manage the demand, the value, the tasks, etc. They do not say much about how to actually run development processes.

We enjoy differentiate agile projects from Scrum/Kanban projects. How? Well, an agile project implements everything. In other words, it implements Scrum and agile development practices like peer programming, code review, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD). DevOps is more than just code/CI/CD—it is all of this.

This is fundamental in our opinion. We have seen DevOps fail because teams forget about the value they are supposed to deliver in their implementation. If teams forget to consider the management of business demands, what is developed will not always match actual needs—just like back in the old days. With DevOps, your team will be more efficient to deliver the non-value more quickly…

Our position: Value DevOps

You have probably seen the term DevSecOps, which brings of security into the DevOps approach. We recommend “thinking DevOps” while keeping the value you need to bring to operations in mind at all times. This is ValueDevOps! ValueDevOps is not another new buzzword. ValueDevOps is just the way we talk about DevOps. Demand, User Stories, Developments, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, and Continuous Delivery are all part of the game and are only one goal. All of these components should be considered holistically, which also means that they should be linked and tooled holistically.

Tuleap, Sponsor of DevOpsDays Geneva, February 2019

Tuleap was Sponsor Gold at the first DevOpsDays Geneva edition. This event in French-speaking Switzerland took place on the 21st and 22nd of February 2019. Tuleap developers has been on site with a booth to exchange about DevOps practiaces and tools and demo you Tuleap.

140 releases a month

Tuleap developers are the first users of Tuleap software. Manuel Vacelet, as the CTO and Product Owner, enjoy sharing how we (Product Owner, Developers and IT Ops people), as one single team, is able to build 140 releases a month for an on-premises update in less than 30 minutes. Manuel VACELET, CTO in the Tuleap team has given a talk on 21st March 2019 to share our real-world example of how doing end-to-end Agile-DevOps. He shared the mindset, workflow, tools, best practices…and failures—everything he has learned over the past eight years.

About Manuel VACELET

Manuel Vacelet

As CTO of Enalean and Tuleap product owner within Enalean, Manuel’s mission is to keep Enalean’s tech team happy. This means providing our developers and other tech staffers with a challenging and rewarding work environment guided by a single philosophy: to be accountable to our customers in everything we do. Manuel spends much of his workday…you guessed it…reviewing code! He also dabbles in systems administration, continuous integration, and other software-engineering tasks.

Other resources on DevOps


About

Laurent Charles

Laurent understands the power of software to change your business. During his 16 years in IT Delivery at a Forbes 100 company, he implemented software development practices to make teams more productive and collaborative. He actively promotes the open source culture and libre communities to bring organizations increased innovation and efficiency. As a CEO, he founded Enalean and developed Tuleap to help organizations turn their software into a competitive advantage.