And Now the Bottle-neck is in Operations
In his Agile Austin presentation, colleague and friend Michael Cote discussed velocity in Agile development vis-a-vis velocity in IT operations. To quote Cote:
Technologies used by public web companies and now cloud computing are looking to offer a new way to deliver applications by addressing deployment and provisioning concerns. Agile software development has sped up the actual development of software, and now the bottle-neck is in operations who’re not always able to deploy software at the same velocity that Agile teams ship code. What do these technologies look like, are they realistic, and how might they affect your organization?
The topic is important from a few perspectives, such as the new
business models it enables. With Agile infrastructure, a closed loop is
formed between vendor and customer. This loop operates on the basis of
close to real-time feedback. The new functionality in the software
deployed in the afternoon could be in response to a specific need that
was brought up in the morning. Hence, the business focus and the
business design change from software that has already been developed and
tested (‘done done’) but not yet delivered, to one that has been
developed, tested and deployed (‘done done done’) in ultra fast way.
It should also be pointed out that the line between developing content and developing software gets really blurry nowadays. From a company perspective both software and contents are entities that are being made available for dissemination. If you accept the premise that the generation of content and development of the corresponding software should be done under a unified Agile model, the desirability, the power and the benefits of managing development and delivery in unison become obvious. When applied to both content and software, an agile infrastructure paradigm could easily transform the publishing industry, and others.
In short, the business benefits Agile Infrastructure begets trump the (very significant) operational benefits it enables.
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
