The turnaround for DevOps processes must be fast. We need to consider time to market in the larger perspective, and simply stay focused on our tasks in the smaller perspective. This line of thought is also held by the Continuous Delivery movement.

As with many things Agile, many of the ideas in DevOps and Continuous Delivery are in fact different names of the same basic concepts. There really isn't any contention between the two concepts; they are two sides of the same coin.

DevOps engineers work on making enterprise processes faster, more efficient, and more reliable. Repetitive manual labor, which is error prone, is removed whenever possible.

It's easy, however, to lose track of the goal when working with DevOps implementations. Doing nothing faster is of no use to anyone. Instead, we must keep track of delivering increased business value.

For instance, increased communication between roles in the organization has clear value. Your product owners might be wondering how the development process is going and are eager to have a look. In this situation, it is useful to be able to deliver incremental improvements of code to the test environments quickly and efficiently. In the test environments, the involved stake holders, such as product owners and, of course, the quality assurance teams, can follow the progress of the development process.

Another way to look at it is this: If you ever feel yourself losing focus because of needless waiting, something is wrong with your processes or your tooling. If you find yourself watching videos of robots shooting balloons during compile time, your compile times are too long!

The same is true for teams idling while waiting for deploys and so on. This idling is, of course, even more expensive than that of a single individual.

While robot shooting practice videos are fun, software development is inspiring too! We should help focus creative potential by eliminating unnecessary overhead.

A death ray laser robot versus your team's productivity

There are several different cycles in Agile development, from the Portfolio level through to the Scrum and Kanban cycles and down to the Continuous Integration cycle. The emphasis on which cadence work happens in is a bit different depending on which Agile framework you are working with. Kanban emphasizes the 24-hour cycle and is popular in operations teams. Scrum cycles can be between two to four weeks and are often used by development teams using the Scrum Agile process. Longer cycles are also common and are called Program Increments, which span several Scrum Sprint cycles, in Scaled Agile Framework.

The Agile wheel of wheels

DevOps must be able to support all these cycles. This is quite natural given the central theme of DevOps: cooperation between disciplines in an Agile organization.

The most obvious and measurably concrete benefits of DevOps occur in the shorter cycles, which in turn make the longer cycles more efficient. Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves, as the old adage goes.

Here are some examples of when DevOps can benefit Agile cycles:

Richard Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in the field of quantum physics in 1965. He noticed a common behavior among scientists, in which they went though all the motions of science but missed some central, vital ingredient of the scientific process. He called this behavior "cargo cult science," since it was reminiscent of the cargo cults in the Melanesian South Sea islands. These cargo cults where formed during the Second World War when the islanders watched great planes land with useful cargo. After the war stopped, the cargo also stopped coming. The islanders started simulating landing strips, doing everything just as they had observed the American military do, in order for the planes to land.

A cargo cult Agile aeroplane

We are not working in an Agile or DevOps-oriented manner simply because we have a morning stand-up where we drink coffee and chat about the weather. We don't have a DevOps pipeline just because we have a Puppet implementation that only the operations team knows anything about.

It is very important that we keep track of our goals and continuously question whether we are doing the right thing and are still on the right track. This is central to all Agile thinking. It is, however, something that is manifestly very hard to do in practice. It is easy to wind up as followers of the cargo cults.

When constructing deployment pipelines, for example, keep in mind why we are building them in the first place. The goal is to allow people to interact with new systems faster and with less work. This, in turn, helps people with different roles interact with each other more efficiently and with less turnaround.

If, on the other hand, we build a pipeline that only helps one group of people achieve their goals, for instance, the operations personnel, we have failed to achieve our basic goal.

While this is not an exact science, it pays to bear in mind that Agile cycles, such as the sprint cycle in the Scrum Agile method, normally have a method to deal with this situation. In Scrum, this is called the sprint retrospective, where the team gets together and discusses what went well and what could have gone better during the sprint. Spend some time here to make sure you are doing the right thing in your daily work.

A common problem here is that the output from the sprint retrospective isn't really acted upon. This, in turn, may be caused by the unfortunate fact that the identified problems were really caused by some other part of the organization that you don't communicate well with. Therefore, these problems come up again and again in the retrospectives and are never remedied.

If you recognize that your team is in this situation, you will benefit from the DevOps approach since it emphasizes cooperation between roles in the organization.

To summarize, try to use the mechanisms provided in the Agile methods in your methods themselves. If you are using Scrum, use the sprint retrospective mechanism to capture potential improvements. This being said, don't take the methods as gospel. Find out what works for you.

This section explains how DevOps and other ways of working coexist and fit together in a larger whole.

DevOps fits well together with many frameworks for Agile or Lean enterprises. Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe® , specifically mentions DevOps. There is nearly never any disagreement between proponents of different Agile practices and DevOps since DevOps originated in the Agile environments. The story is a bit different with ITIL, though.

ITIL, which was formerly known as Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a practice used by many large and mature organizations.

ITIL is a large framework that formalizes many aspects of the software life cycle. While DevOps and Continuous Delivery hold the view that the changesets we deliver to production should be small and happen often, at first glance, ITIL would appear to hold the opposite view. It should be noted that this isn't really true. Legacy systems are quite often monolithic, and in these cases, you need a process such as ITIL to manage the complex changes often associated with large monolithic systems.

If you are working in a large organization, the likelihood that you are working with such large monolithic legacy systems is very high.

In any case, many of the practices described in ITIL translate directly into corresponding DevOps practices. ITIL prescribes a configuration management system and a configuration management database. These types of systems are also integral to DevOps, and several of them will be described in this book.

This chapter presented a brief overview of the background of the DevOps movement. We discussed the history of DevOps and its roots in development and operations, as well as in the Agile movement. We also took a look at how ITIL and DevOps might coexist in larger organizations. The cargo cult anti-pattern was explored, and we discussed how to avoid it. You should now be able to answer where DevOps fits into a larger Agile context and the different cycles of Agile development.

We will gradually move toward more technical and hands-on subjects. The next chapter will present an overview of what the technical systems we tend to focus on in DevOps look like.