The Power of Business in Synergy: How Agile and DevOps Accelerate Development through CI/CD
Hello! I am Stanislav Tibekin, CEO of the IT integrator Nixys . We specialize in building DevOps, DevSecOps, MLOps processes.
In this article, I will tell you how Agile and DevOps complement each other, creating a culture of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) that accelerates the development process, and why Agile is impossible without DevOps.
Agile: history, ideas, practice
In recent years, Agile and DevOps have significantly changed traditional approaches to product development. The combination of these two methodologies has contributed to the creation of a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) culture, which has accelerated the development process and improved its quality.
More than 50 years ago, software development pioneers created the waterfall model of application development - in which work on a project proceeds in a cascade, and the next stage can only be started after the previous one is completed. This bureaucracy greatly slowed down the development process, and it was hardly possible to create a truly innovative product using this strict and slightly outdated methodology. So, 30 years later, IT specialists developed the Agile methodology, in which work on a project proceeded in a horizontal flow, and the approach to infrastructure management began to change.
Let's start with Agile. This is a system of principles for "flexible" project management. Instead of long-term planning, which often proves ineffective in dynamically changing product requirements, Agile offers frequent small iterations (sprints), a list of tasks with the ability to change their priority (backlog), and daily reports. As a result, teams can make changes and improvements more quickly, and the customer is always informed and sees progress here and now.
The obvious advantages of the new method include low risks of failure, since testing and interaction with customers is present at the end of each sprint, so there is always an opportunity to understand if something does not meet expectations and fix it. And the second big plus is the flexibility of deadlines. If work on a feature has dragged on, or some tasks have lost their relevance, they can be abandoned during the development process and the deadlines can be adapted to the new realities, without slowing down the development process in any way.
The most common problem our clients face is related to the organization of product development in their companies. Let's consider this typical situation: the customer creates a product that is worked on by different teams: each according to its own rules, they have their own roadmap, the developers follow it, create tasks in Jira, report on the results. Everything is in the best traditions of Agile: sprints, backlog, qualitative and quantitative metrics. But when the time comes for the release, it is rolled out manually and suddenly something breaks in the most unexpected way. And this happens every time.
How Agile and DevOps Complement Each Other
Now let's add DevOps. DevOps unites development and operational teams, making project work more coordinated and efficient. The main goal is to automate processes, which significantly reduces the time of release to production and minimizes human errors.
The Agile manifesto emphasizes the importance of communication and collaboration between all project participants, which fits perfectly with the DevOps culture, which is aimed at uniting development and operations teams. This creates an environment where teams work together, bound by one common goal - fast and high-quality product development, and not just to finish their part of the work as quickly as possible, as is assumed by the waterfall development model.
Take, for example, regular team meetings – in our company, we call it a weekly “sink” (from the English “think”). These are short meetings where everyone shares their plans, what worked out, and what didn’t. This approach increases transparency and stimulates creativity and active participation of each team member, which ultimately leads to the creation of a higher-quality product, because new interesting ideas are often born during the discussion.
Agile also emphasizes the importance of receiving regular feedback from users, which allows for continuous improvement of the product, and DevOps complements this with continuous monitoring and logging, collecting data on the application’s operation in real time.
The combination of Agile and DevOps is essentially a synergy of methodology and technical solutions. Agile sets the pace and adaptability, and DevOps provides the tools to implement these principles. Together, they create a culture where everyone on the team knows their role and can collaborate effectively with others, and this fundamentally changes the approach to software development. Instead of long cycles of development, verification and deployment, we get a fast, flexible and reliable process that allows us to release a high-quality product in the shortest possible time. It's like switching from a slow Internet to a high-speed one - the difference in efficiency is colossal.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Culture
It was at the intersection of Agile and DevOps that the concept of CI/CD emerged, which represents the practices of continuous integration and delivery.
To make your Agile truly Agile, you need to modernize your infrastructure according to DevOps principles: use containerization tools (such as Docker) to avoid deploying virtual machines every time and, ultimately, spend less time. For more flexible management of these containers, you need to use orchestration systems such as Kubernetes, the architecture should be microservices, and servers should be deployed not manually, but using the Infrastructure-as-Code approach.
What is CI/CD? It is a “pipeline”, a series of steps that are performed using tools and automation to implement the DevOps life cycle. CI (Continuous Integration) assumes that developers can quickly make changes to a common repository, and each commit will go through a series of automated tests. This gives confidence that the new code will not break the existing functionality of services, and CD (Continuous Delivery) makes it possible to automatically deploy updates to different environments: testing, pre-production and, finally, production. This allows you to implement new features and find errors before the release, and if the update still breaks something, roll it back with almost one button. Automation of this process minimizes the human factor and significantly speeds up time-to-market. Legends say that with a properly configured CI/CD, even Friday deployments are not scary. Everything goes smoothly, without failures. This became possible only thanks to DevOps and Agile.
Conclusion
To sum it up, it is safe to say that the implementation of DevOps and Agile brings significant benefits to business. DevOps allows for faster release of new product versions due to automation and minimization of the human factor, which reduces time-to-market. This directly affects key metrics such as the speed of response to user requests, frequency of updates, and overall customer satisfaction. In addition, close interaction between development and operations teams, as well as constant monitoring, increases product reliability and improves team productivity.
It is worth noting that the Agile methodology loses its effectiveness without DevOps. Agile implies flexibility and adaptability, but if DevOps processes are not built, it is impossible to build the infrastructure necessary for the rapid and safe implementation of changes. DevOps provides tools for automating testing and deployment, which makes the development process more predictable. And at the intersection, there is a culture of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Together, they form a single, well-coordinated system. Such synergy not only improves the quality of the product, but also significantly increases the company's competitiveness in a rapidly changing market.
It is the combination of Agile and DevOps that allows us to create a flexible and sustainable development process, where each team member understands their role and effectively interacts with others. As a result, we get not just fast and frequent releases, but a reliable and high-quality product that meets customer needs and ensures the growth and development of the company.