Agile in Value Delivery

Agile in End to End Value Delivery 

Agile has made development faster and have frequent deployments. Business and IT operations needs stability with speed.  To bridge this gap agile need to stretch itself beyond development and deployment. Business and Development team together need to consider software as a value.

A software value chain is a series of software definition, development, deployment process and operation process.   A series of align process and tools need to work along and synchronized way to provide continuous flow of value to the customer or end user. Processes and tools need to work around the value to provide simplified development and deployment to remove unnecessary handoff and step, also accelerate the delivery of the value by implementing lean and agile principals and practices. Can agile principle be defined to operation also?

Lean and Agile have many things in common each are focused on value delivery

Legacy Dev Ops Model

Teams and Roles

Product Management : The team is responsible for define the functionalities required in the product. In tandem with the Business Operation the team strategies the requirement for the Development Team or Product Vendor for  Product Changes (using the defined Change Control  Process ).  Product Vendors have Product Owners who interact with the team and add these changes to the product log for the Agile team to define and plan Sprints

Tools Used :  Requirement Analysis and Gathering tools, Requirement Tracking and DMS tool  eg Rational, Visio, XLS, Clearcase  

Development Team: Plan and execute the sprints and publish Sprint plan for the deployment, Burn Charts for management. Weekly releases to the staging system for the UAT team to test . A group of sprint releases or one sprint release can be part of the release plan published by the Product owner to the Production and Business Operation.

Tools Used :  Version Control (SVN, CVS,GIT, Visual SourceSafe, Starteam ), ALM tools (SwiftALM, Wizible, Collabnet, Microsoft Team foundation), Continuous integration (Jenkins, Hudson )

UAT /SIT Team: The team is responsible for testing the release in the staging system for integration and system and when done provide UAT pass approval for the release team to prepare release build/ patch  for  Product team

Tools Used : Testpro, Testing Tools/ Simulators, Load runner

Release team : Is responsible for the SCM activity and release activity for both Staging and Production system. Depending on the published release plan and date the team will provide signed build and release note once a go is provided  by the SIT team in the staging server. The team publishes to the stake holders for  downtime approval.

Tools used : Continuous integration (Jenkins, Hudson ),Cruise Control,  ALM tools and PLM tools

Production Support : On downtime approval the team deploys the build or patch on the production system and runs and acceptance test with the business operation. A go-live is declared on successful deployment else it is rolled back with a failure issues logged in the incident system with severity  

Tools : Ticketing or incident management tools ( Bugzilla, Jira, Quality Center, fogbuz), PLM tools like redmine. SwiftPLM, etc

Business Operation: Responsible to provide go-live testing and also provide product changes required for Business Needs

Tools:  The product, Incident Management Tools, PLM tools to track changes status.   

Agile Process in Delivering Value in Operations

Agile team starts with a value delivery (Value Release Team). The Release is planned as a value to be delivered with the whole team. The story board is build on the value and the product log and service catalogue is build on the story board. This is the take away for the agile development   team, release team, business ops, testing team, infrastructure team and product support team.

Agile Value Model