How Deployment Automation Speeds Up Your Agile Development

Broadcast Date : Thursday, June 17, 2010
Time: 10:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM CT / 1:00 PM ET / 7:00 PM CET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Andrew Phillips, Vice President, Product Development, XebiaLabs
Bob Aiello, Editor-in-Chief, CM Crossroads
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Development iterations in the Agile philosophy can be as short as one or two weeks, leading to a constant stream of new software packages. As a consequence, in Agile there will be many small software deliveries rather than one big one as was the case in the traditional waterfall approach.

This iterative strategy leads to a nearly continuous stream of software packages that Operations then has to deploy to the production environments. So as soon as Development starts to embrace change by using Agile methods in their software engineering process, the Operations department needs to change their way of working as well.

What does this mean for the way Development and Operations cooperate? Productivity gains for Development of 400%-500% when using Agile are not uncommon. This means Operations needs to become much more productive as well. If Development delivers 4 to 5 times more software packages per unit of time, Operations consequently has to deploy 4 to 5 times more packages as well. Still, the entire change process has to remain intact, also for smaller updates, putting restrictions on how fast Operations can scale up.

How do you handle this?

• Can your Operations and Development teams continue to cooperate as they used to do before they adopted Agile methodologies?
• Are there specific Agile methodologies for the Operations teams as well?
• Can ‘self-service deployments’ be used as a way for Agile developers to deploy new updates themselves directly?
• Can IT organizations continue to safely and reliably deploy their software components while working ‘Agile’?

Join in on this discussion during the webcast on June 17th, and subscribe yourself now!