Facilitating Continuous Delivery with Agile and DevOps: An Overview

 

continuous-delivery-with-agile-and-devOps

Organizations, these days, implement agile methodologies to enhance the speed of software delivery. Agile software development is much more than various practices like test-driven development, planning sessions, pair programming, stand-ups, and sprints. The term denotes a set of practices that include promoting sustainable development, maintaining a constant pace, gaining a competitive edge, attention to technical excellence, ensuring customer satisfaction, and more. 

Now, with the progress in time, advancement in technology, increased competition in the market, and customer satisfaction becoming a priority, DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CD) have emerged to streamline the entire process of software development and delivery and maximize its efficacy. The blog explores the way to extend Agile with DevOps for continuous delivery.

How DevOps amplifies Agility

Agile methodologies encouraged teamwork and smart results. By breaking down software development into smaller chunks, Agile practices effectively accelerated feedback loops and aligned product features with consumer demands. 

With the software community increasingly embracing Agile methodologies, the idea of “scale” came to the forefront. It enabled the developers to produce highly functional software codes in shorter iterations. However, with the involvement of test and deployment, a fragmented process and functional silos were found to be inadequate to reach the objective of Agile efforts. Therefore, the goals of ensuring the quality of software applications and a faster time to market were yet to be satisfied.   

Agile indeed facilitated a new approach aimed at automating and streamlining the software delivery lifecycle. Further, with the advent of Continuous Integration (CI), the practice of frequently checking the codes, testing each chunk, and integrating them into a shared trunk paved the way for smaller and faster releases of the subsequent versions.

All these highlighted the demand for a collaboration among the Development, QA, and Operations teams. 

DevOps approach is proven for supporting and amplifying responsiveness, agility, and faster time to market throughout a software delivery lifecycle.  

Jez Humble in his book, Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, points out that the concept of treating the entire software lifecycle as a single process is embraced by small startups and large enterprises alike. 

DevOps continuous testing further underlines this notion as it involves testing the software at each stage of the development life cycle. Other than ensuring a faster development process, it also contributes to enhancing the quality of the outcome. While Agile practices address the requirements of developers, the focus on DevOps ensures continuous delivery and high Return on Investment (ROI).

Continuous Delivery: The Ultimate Aim 

Industry experts consider DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CD) to be the extensions of Agile methodologies that offer a long-term value. Kurt Bittner remarks: “If Agile was the opening act, continuous delivery is the headliner”. 

CD transforms the way software is delivered. It leverages and extends the potential of Agile by combining DevOps and CI practices. 

CD follows the methodologies in software development that improves the procedure of software delivery and ensures reliable software releases. Implementing automation across CI builds, testing, and deployment - CD spans across various dimensions of research and development. Thus, it enables the systematic, reliable, and faster release of quality software. 

Martin Fowler, a renowned figure in the realm of software development, outlines the questions that a continuous delivery process should abide by: 

·         Is the software deployable all through its lifecycle? 

·         Can anyone get automated and faster feedback on the readiness of the application when someone makes a change? 

·         Can the DevOps team keep the software deployable while introducing new features? 

·         Is push-button deployment possible for any version of the software to any environment? 

Benefits of Extending Agile with DevOps for Continuous Delivery 

·         Faster time to market 

·         Enhanced productivity 

·         Winning a competitive edge 

·         Reliable release 

·         Improved product quality

·         Customer satisfaction 

Way Forward 

Agile methodologies and DevOps approaches ensure that end products stay competitive and provide an exceptional user experience. 

Cigniti’s DevOps Test Centre of Excellence (TCoE) capitalizes on DevOps continuous testing process to ensure a seamless and continuous delivery. It offers a suite of services including: 

·         DevOps implementation for QA

·         DevOps practice readiness and maturity assessment

·         Automated test orchestration solutions

·         Tool feasibility and recommendations 

Resource

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Article Source: devopsdigest.com

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discuss Test Orchestration and its Role in Achieving Optimal Quality of Software

Image
  In the DevOps approach of developing, testing, and delivering software applications, there is a need to accelerate testing within the constraints of budget and time. This entails automating the testing process as part of the testing strategy. In many cases, continuous test automation is often considered as a discrete step in the build pipeline rather than a sequence of steps. For any continuous testing strategy, all software applications need to pass through a series of tests before they pass muster in the crucible of quality. These may include unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, smoke testing, performance testing, security testing, and others. For DevOps QA testing, each of these tests should be subjected to automation to enhance quality, reduce test time, and improve the certainty of software behavior. However, merely automating the tests left, right, and center does not augur well when it comes to achieving an optimal quality level as well as minimizing the ...
Read more

What is the Importance of Compatibility Testing for a Software Application?

Image
  Customers are wont to use software applications for various purposes across device platforms, networks, operating systems, and browsers. They expect the software applications to perform seamlessly irrespective of the digital environments. However, customer experience in real-time does not always achieve such performance causing disgruntlement. In an industry where new devices are launched with different configurations, and new versions of operating systems, frameworks, and browsers are released in a few weeks or months, ensuring the software application perform seamlessly across platforms can be a herculean task. Moreover, since it is practically impossible to evaluate each customer’s usage of a device, browser, operating system, or network, it is imperative to ensure the software application functions properly across digital environments. This calls for integrating compatibility testing in the SDLC. What is compatibility testing and why is it important? Compatibility testing...
Read more

How many Types of Mobile App Testing Services are there?

Image
  The utilitarian value of mobile phones has been mainly due to the plethora of applications that are accessed by users to perform a raft of activities. These may include watching movies, paying utility bills, booking tickets, playing games, reading informative content, and buying merchandise, among others. Does this mean users lap up every application on offer? The answer is an emphatic NO as users look for attributes such as fast loading time, enhanced security, seamless navigability, and many others. Even as businesses are aware of the need to employ mobile testing services and ensure the release of quality applications, the pressure to remain competitive often overrides such considerations. Statistics show that approximately 68.07 percent of mobile applications never reach 1,000 downloads (Statista). In other words, approximately 67 percent of mobile app developers do not make a profit. So, what is the way out and ensure the apps hit the bull’s eye of customers’ approval? It’s ...
Read more