Michael Oubre – Agile evangelist, practitioner and trainer, and Marc Hornbeek – DevOps continuous testing evangelist and thought leader, share their views on popular questions regarding Agile and DevOps from their respective viewpoints.
If you are doing Agile do you need to do Continuous Integration?
Michael: From an Agile perspective, let’s consider your company decided to take the plunge and switch its software development process to Agile, formed Agile teams, got them some training and set them up with a coach. The team have been scrumming for a couple of iterations but there’s not a lot of work getting finished, and many of the stories are having to be carried over from sprint to sprint to get the defects resolved.
You might be tempted to start worrying about the quality of the code being written, or whether you have the right ratio of test engineers, but it might be more useful to look at your build/test cycle. One of the big benefits of Agile is the reduction of the time between the code being written and the identification of defects – the shorter that time is, the lower the cost is to get it fixed. Agile removes the process barriers, but if you only rely on unit testing and infrequent integration testing, you won’t achieve the results that you hope for.
Agile teams will have a very difficult time of ever reaching high performance without the benefits of Continuous Integration providing the ability to deliver new code in an integrated, testable build to the Agile teams as close to “instantly” as you can manage.
Marc: From a DevOps perspective development teams that are “doing Agile” are the primary customers of Continuous Integration together with Continuous Testing.
Both Agile and DevOps emphasize the importance of incremental development processes rather than large, serial waterfall processes because incremental processes facilitate fast feedback and reduce process waste compared to long waiting periods between software creation and validation. In fact the DevOps “movement” was born out of a system test consultant’s frustration with the disconnect between some Agile development teams and separate operations teams. (Reference: http://itrevolution.com/the-history-of-devops/) . Today the words Continuous Integration and DevOps, together with Continuous Testing and Continuous Delivery are practically synonymous.
The mere fact that there are plenty of successful Agile examples that existed prior to DevOps or Continuous Integration became a word tells you that Agile can indeed be done without CI, but clearly CI is a great complement to Agile and supports the goals of Agile while helping to tie it to operations. So the strict answer the question “If you are doing Agile do you need to do Continuous Integration?” is, well, “no” but to leave it at that would be incomplete, so a better answer is “ no, but CI is definitely recommended to complement Agile”.
Bottom line is, from both Agile and DevOps perspectives continuous integration is really important to achieving performance goals. At Spirent we think Agile and DevOps work together to help teams develop and deliver quality software efficiently. More information about Spirent’s views can be found at the following link: Spirent.com/solutions/devops
What do you think of these views and do you have other views?
About Michael Oubre
Michael Oubre is an expert in Agile practice, transformation and management and has spent more than 10 years as a practitioner, coach, trainer and evangelist. His long and eventful tech career has given him practical experience and insight into every aspect of building, deploying, supporting and managing software, systems and networks.
