Moving from Traditional to Agile DevOps

Kevin Aguanno is the agile practice lead for Procept Associates Ltd., one of PMI’s first Registered Education Providers, specializing in training and project and programme strategy consulting. Author of over 30 books, audiobooks and DVDs on project management topics, he teaches agile methods at several universities and at conferences around the world. He spends most of his time helping large, complex organizations integrate agile project management methods into their governance frameworks.

  Agile   Governance   Quality   Testing/Test Management  

A hot trend these days is the move toward agile DevOps, the term used to describe the process flow from software development through testing to deployment, and ongoing support (called “development operations,” this is usually shortened to “DevOps”).

The promise of agile DevOps is to speed up the DevOps processes and make them more responsive to change. However, trying to implement agile DevOps in a traditional DevOps environment is a huge challenge without first changing underlying governance practices. In this article, I’ll explain why and identify some success factors.

Traditionally, software developers, testers and the people running the IT infrastructure don’t work together very effectively. While there are cultural differences between these groups, many organizations also impose strict process separation between these groups. Agile approaches encourage cross-role collaboration, which often runs into difficulty when facing an organization with strictly separated functions. Let’s take a moment to understand the roots of the problem before we discuss the solution.

Reasons for Separating Roles
I’m going to start with a true story (names have been changed to protect the identities of the people and organizations involved)…

In the late 1980s, Megabank had a set of development processes whereby a programmer would…

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