Saturday, May 11, 2019

Agile team leaders and DevOps

I'm currently reading Microsoft's Open edX course AZ-400.7 Designing a DevOps Strategy where, after an extensive presentation of Agile manifesto, principles and methodologies, in chapter 2 Planning Effective Code Reviews says:
Team leaders need to establish and foster an appropriate culture across their teams.
What team leaders in Agile? Agile roles are clearly defined (in the context of Scrum methodology, which in practice almost always go hand in hand with Agile), and there is no 'team leader' in it, rather the entire development team is empowered and entrusted to self-organize itself.

Searching Google for 'agile team leader' will render various pages where people is explaining that's a bad idea and shouldn't happen in Agile. I beg to differ, but that would be another story, someday.

On the other hand, how the whole DevOps new ideas embrace agility? I see some other pages comparing the two, and many times there is a tiny 'vs' between them, "Agile vs DevOps", suggesting them as competing terms.

It's true that Agile focuses mainly between communications and relationships between business (stakeholders and product owner) and development team, while DevOps focuses on that dev team one step further, seeing them as proper software development team and operations team (each with its own goals).

And is also true that DevOps is agile (with lower case "a"), is even mentioned somehow ("continuous delivery") in first principle of Agile Manifesto, but where in Agile methodology talks about 'DevOps'? DevOps is more than just a simple notion of continuous delivery, it encompasses principles, processes and tools dedicated to it. Maybe we'll see more of it in future updates of Agile methodologies.

Until then, I'm reading more of something else I come across: Disciplined Agile (DA). One of its layers is clearly named 'Disciplined DevOps'. It looks like DA is more agile than Agile. One thing I like about it is that has a holistic approach for entire agile enterprise, not just IT development department. Another is that recognize some other important (primary) roles, like architecture owner, team leaders or DevOps, as well as supporting roles, all within an agile framework or toolkit, as they name it.

I'd definitely read more about DA[D], as it looks very appealing to me, especially in the context of DevOps.

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