Find out how the concepts of Agile are changing and growing in influence, including the increasing importance of DevOps

1. The Evolution of
Agile, towards
DevOps

2. The Evolution of Agile, Towards DevOps 1
I’ve recently completed reading ‘The Phoenix Project’
(http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-devops-book/), and it
provides an exciting vision of how far the concepts of agile and lean
have come in the last 10 years. Putting DevOps and deployment
automation on to the radar of a wide audience is a great development,
and an indication of how far agile methods have penetrated into some
IT environments.
In my early days of exposure to Agile, I think at the XPDay
(http://xpday.wordpress.com/) conference in 2004, I was kindly given a
copy of Goldratt’s ‘The Goal’ by my friend Lindsay McEwan. Lindsay
had presented a session on Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, and the
potential link between what Goldratt was proposing and the world of
eXtreme Programming was clear. Goldratt brought the concept of
Toyota’s kanban process into clear alignment with software
development, and this is what The Phoenix Project builds on.
Seeing thought leaders write about how things should be done is one
thing, but does that mean anyone is listening? The best way to judge
the adoption of a trend is to look at the frequency of job advertisements
for the skill in question. If companies are hiring for it, then they are
using (or trying to use) it. In the world of HTML5 and big data, this is
information is really easy to find too. Take a look
athttp://www.indeed.com/jobtrends, and just tap in your keywords! Look
at the explosion of ‘devops’ here:
Even without the aid of indeed.com data, in those early days of seeing
agile, it was clearly a fast-growing requirement for many development
teams in London. Agile was becoming an in-demand skill, and this
growth in demand meant that experienced practitioners were hard to
find. Indeed, that was why I and other entrepreneurs established
recruitment agency practices focused on servicing that market. Step on

3. 2
2
a couple of years to the late noughties, and ‘agile’ as an umbrella term
was practically mainstream, and agencies claiming to specialise in the
sector were prolific. The challenge became two-fold:
i) Separating true Agile practitioners from those who just
put it on their CV
ii) Finding Agile QA engineers
The second of these challenges was the most interesting. Demand for
Agile staff outside development indicated that the ideas and methods
were spreading within larger organisations, across departmental
boundaries. This was a big step for Agile. In moving out of pilot
development teams, it was becoming mainstream. Step forward again
to the present, and I hear from several industry insiders that they are
now establishing recruitment practices focused on DevOps.
This is the next natural step for Agile, and if recruiters are starting to
focus on it, then the momentum is building. As Agile has gone
mainstream, it has pushed its way through development teams, QA
teams, and now into the infrastructure teams.
But the desire of infrastructure teams to change is a little different, as
the driving forces come from two different directions. Pushing down
from above are the development teams applying the rapid-release
methods of Agile, and practices like continuous integration. But coming
up from below are the public-cloud infrastructure systems like EC2.
These provide an opportunity for IT teams to deliver flexible
infrastructures to the more changeable requirements of an Agile world.
This places the world of DevOps in a critical position to revolutionise
business outside of IT (also the main thrust of the Phoenix Project). By
enabling both the rapid development of the Agile teams and the flexible
infrastructure opportunities of the ‘cloud’, successful DevOps
practitioners can enable innovation (and competitive advantage) whilst
simultaneously driving efficiency improvements.
Of course, any such change will probably require some automation
tooling….

4. The Evolution of Agile, Towards DevOps 3