50
DevOps has its source in agile software development, and it is an explicit aspect of the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. As a result there is a collection of agile development strategies which enable effective DevOps throughout the agile delivery lifecycle. These strategies include:
- Initial requirements envisioning. Disciplined agile teams invest time at the beginning of the project to identify the high-level scope in a light-weight, collaborative manner. This includes common operations requirements such as the need to backup and restore data sources, to instrument the solution so that it can be monitored in real time by operations staff, or to architect the solution in a modular manner to enable easier deployment.
- Initial architecture envisioning. Disciplined agile teams will also identify a viable architectural strategy which reflects the requirements of their stakeholders and your organization’s overall architectural strategy (hence the need to work closely with your enterprise architects and operations staff). One goal is to ensure that the team is building (or buying) a solution which will work well with the existing operational infrastructure and to begin negotiating any infrastructural changes (such as deploying new technologies) early in the project. Another goal is to ensure that operations-oriented requirements are addressed by the architecture from the very start.
- Initial release planning. As part of release planning the disciplined agile team works closely with their operations group to identify potential release windows to aim for, any release blackout periods to avoid, and the need for operations-oriented milestone reviews later in the lifecycle (if appropriate).
- Active stakeholder participation. Disciplined agile teams work closely with their stakeholders, including both operations and support staff, all the way through the lifecycle to ensure that their evolving needs are understood.
- Continuous integration (CI). This is a common technical agile practice where the solution is built/compiled, regression tested, and maybe even run through code analysis tools. CI promotes greater quality which in turn enables easier releases into production.
- Parallel independent testing. For enterprise-class development or at scale, particularly when the domain or technology is very complex or in regulatory environments, disciplined agile team will find they need to support their whole team testing efforts with an independent test team running in parallel to the development team. These testing issues often include validation of non-functional requirements – such as security, performance, and availability concerns – and around production system integration. All of these issues are of clear importance for operations departments.
- Continuous deployment. With this practice you automate the promotion of your working solution between environments. By automating as much of the deployment effort as possible, and by running it often, the development team increases the chance of a successful deployment and thereby reduces the risk to the operations environment. Note that deployment into production is generally not automatic, as this is an important decision to be made by your operations/release manager(s).
- Continuous documentation. With this practice supporting documentation, including operations and support documentation, is evolved throughout the lifecycle in concert with the development of new functionality.
- Production release planning. This is the subset of your release planning efforts which focuses on the activities required to deploy into production.
- Production readiness reviews. There should be at least one review, performed by the person(s) responsible for your operations environment, before the solution is deployed into production. The more critical the system, the more product readiness reviews may be required.
- End-of-lifecycle testing. Minimally you will need to run your full automated regression test suite against your baselined code once construction ends. There may also be manual acceptance reviews or testing to be performed, and any appropriate fixing and retesting required to ensure that the solution is truly ready for production.
There’s more to it though than simply adopting some good practices. Your process must also embrace several supporting philosophies. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework not only adopts the practices listed above, and more, but it also promotes several philosophies which enable DevOps:
- Delivery teams should be enterprise aware, that they should work with people such as operations staff and enterprise architects to understand and work towards a common operational infrastructure for your organization.
- Operations and support people should be recognized as key stakeholders of the solution being worked on.
- The delivery team should focus on solutions over software. Software is clearly important, but we will often provide new or upgraded hardware, supporting documentation (including operations and support procedures), change the business/operational processes that stakeholders follow, and even help change the organizational structure in which our stakeholders work.
- Your process should include an explicit governance strategy. Effective governance strategies motivate and enable development teams to leverage and enhance the existing infrastructure, follow existing organizational conventions, and work closely with enterprise teams – all of which help to streamline operations and support of the delivered solutions.
For more detail about this topic, I think that you will find the article I wrote for the December 2011 issue of Cutter IT Journal entitled “Disciplined Agile Delivery and Collaborative DevOps” to be of value.
