These days, everyone says they are pursuing DevOps and agile, and it's a sure thing that the coming year bring an even more intense focus on both. The Covid-19 crisis has proven to be a natural jumping-off point[1] for DevOps, which was intended for remote operations. The need for greater collaboration -- especially since a lot of it is digital -- has never been more intense. What's ahead for DevOps and agile in the coming year? In this first of a series on the year ahead, I canvassed industry leaders with that question, and, essentially, found agreement that DevOps and agile proponents have their work cut out for them.
DevOps[2], the alignment of and collaboration between development and operations teams, and agile[3], which promotes the same between IT and business users, promise to push software out the door and keep it updated in an automated and secure way. Reading the trade journals and analyst reports, one can be forgiven for thinking DevOps and agile are all around. But what has been the reality on the ground? Are we truly seeing DevOps and agile as they're supposed to be?
"In reality, progress within the DevOps landscape has been spotty," according to RJ Jainendra, general manager and VP of IT business management and DevOps at ServiceNow[4]. "Despite advancements and the success that teams have seen within pockets, many of core DevOps challenges continue to hamper organizations. We're seeing small, individual DevOps initiatives succeeding, but larger initiatives are failing to make significant impacts due to manual processes, poor visibility between dev and ops teams, and tool sprawl that hurts agility. For example, many customers aren't seeing significant increases in their rate of releases, claiming that the