snippetMinor
What do businesses that employ multiple development teams use to implement DevOps in a structured manner?
Viewed 0 times
whatteamsimplementbusinessesmannerthatdevelopmentmultiplestructureduse
Problem
Adding DevOps practices to a single development team is a relatively simple proposition as it usually comes down to introducing either people to the team to build up a DevOps, Release Engineering or Platform Engineering capability within an organisation.
Some of the pitfalls organisations are trying to avoid are:
What can be employed to achieve this in a consistent manner in an organisation that has a large number of development teams, potentially in multiple separate business units?
Some of the pitfalls organisations are trying to avoid are:
- Inability to report progress consistently across multiple development teams, for example, if one team reports their progress in terms of the number of equally sized stories completed in 2 weeks; whereas another team reports in storypoints completed in a three-week sprint.
- Inconsistent application of a practice means team members can not easily move between teams within the same organisation without learning new ways of working.
- Mismatches in development cadence across multiple teams makes coordinating dependent releases difficult.
What can be employed to achieve this in a consistent manner in an organisation that has a large number of development teams, potentially in multiple separate business units?
Solution
Large enterprises will commonly adopt a delivery framework, or operating model, that has been built to support large enterprises. From an Agile/DevOps perspective, which is my area of expertise there are three frameworks of interest:
-
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) defines DevOps as delivering business value through the successful operation of software in an environment. This is achieved by giving early attention to the act of "moving into production" and accomplished, in part, by integrating personnel from the operations function within the Agile Teams.
-
Disciplined Agile 2.X, also known as DAD, defines DevOps as "DevOps is the streamlining of the activities surrounding IT solution development and IT operations." this is achieved by building feedback loops between the development and operations functions within the business. DAD goes on to describe Disciplined DevOps as the intersection between the following roles: Enterprise Architecture, IT Operations, Business Operations, Release Management, Data Management and Development.
-
Large Scaled Scrum does not specifically call out DevOps, Release Engineering or Platform Engineering; however, it does describe a methodology for scaling out Scrum in an organisation that is growing fast, integrating a DevOps specialism within these teams is both logical and well understood.
As far as I am aware there are no statistical data about the enterprise adoption of each of these frameworks and whether they have adopted DevOps practices in addition to Agile practices, however from experience many organisations appear to gravitate towards Scaled Agile Framework.
Kristof Horvath discusses the application of DevOps in these enterprise-grade agile frameworks in his article: Scaling Agile in Large Enterprises: LeSS, DAD or SAFe®?.
It is worth noting that adopting an "enterprise-grade" framework is not a requirement in an enterprise, at the end of the day Agile, DevOps and Lean are about adopting the right practices for your organisation, not the most popular ones.
-
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) defines DevOps as delivering business value through the successful operation of software in an environment. This is achieved by giving early attention to the act of "moving into production" and accomplished, in part, by integrating personnel from the operations function within the Agile Teams.
-
Disciplined Agile 2.X, also known as DAD, defines DevOps as "DevOps is the streamlining of the activities surrounding IT solution development and IT operations." this is achieved by building feedback loops between the development and operations functions within the business. DAD goes on to describe Disciplined DevOps as the intersection between the following roles: Enterprise Architecture, IT Operations, Business Operations, Release Management, Data Management and Development.
-
Large Scaled Scrum does not specifically call out DevOps, Release Engineering or Platform Engineering; however, it does describe a methodology for scaling out Scrum in an organisation that is growing fast, integrating a DevOps specialism within these teams is both logical and well understood.
As far as I am aware there are no statistical data about the enterprise adoption of each of these frameworks and whether they have adopted DevOps practices in addition to Agile practices, however from experience many organisations appear to gravitate towards Scaled Agile Framework.
Kristof Horvath discusses the application of DevOps in these enterprise-grade agile frameworks in his article: Scaling Agile in Large Enterprises: LeSS, DAD or SAFe®?.
It is worth noting that adopting an "enterprise-grade" framework is not a requirement in an enterprise, at the end of the day Agile, DevOps and Lean are about adopting the right practices for your organisation, not the most popular ones.
Context
StackExchange DevOps Q#660, answer score: 6
Revisions (0)
No revisions yet.