100% Agile within a Year – The DevOps Cube

25

SEPTEMBER 2017 by Niall Crawford

An interesting article I spotted on LinkedIn this week:

[Bank] to be “100 per cent Agile” within a year, says senior coach

Interesting for a few reasons, one – the post was quickly removed after receiving a battering in the comments section and across general social media and secondly because these “agile at scale” comments are a pet “bug-bear” of mine.

Saying that however, I probably must also assume that the excitable author may have “partially” miscommunicated the intended message of the “agile thought leader” and thus why the article was quickly swept under the carpet. Nevertheless, it did get me thinking. How could a large company, like a bank, be 100% agile? And how could they prove it? I see two fundamental challenges or truisms:

Companies are federated

Companies tend to be federated, by Business Unit or Platform and of course teams. This of course has certain benefits, however, it also means “mileage” can vary. Some teams have good leaders & smart engineers, other poorer divisions less so.

Measuring agile is difficult.

Counting the number of agile coaches is not a realistic method and organizations rarely have the necessary statistics (past baseline information or accurate real-time statistics) to demonstrate they have accelerated delivery timelines, increased change volumes and continue to provide quality. With this objective in mind, I set a challenge for the team to come up with a solution, using our own Enov8 Platform, that our clients might use as a method, in part at least, to measure their IT maturity & agility. The result after some brain storming was the “DevOps Cube”.

An approach based on understanding the organization is built upon IT Systems & Platforms. Each system is made up of building blocks that span across:

IT Environment Tiers i.e. infrastructure, applications & data
IT Environment Operations e.g. build, deploy, test (& maybe secure).

They also have different maturity levels from Chaos to Defined to Automated to Self-Service.

Using this method of measurement, which is already captured with the enov8 platform, an organization can determine at a granular level whether a system instance has CICD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) capabilities and review it at a more holistic level e.g. by Platform, Business Unit or Enterprise.

Enov8 will be providing the DevOps Cube with their Environment & Release Management solutions. Request a demo, or contact us for more information about the enov8 platform.

Contact Us

Relevant Articles

Release Dashboards: How to Improve Visibility and Control

When software releases go wrong, it’s rarely because someone dropped the ball. Usually, it’s because no one had a clear picture of what was happening. Without visibility, things slip through the cracks. Deadlines get missed, bugs sneak in, and teams spend their time...

Implementation Planning: A Guide for IT Leaders

Let’s roll up our sleeves and talk about something every child grows up dreaming to do as an adult: implementation planning. I kid, of course, but implementation planning is a critical business activity that bears examination. Implementation planning is a process...

7 Test Data Generation Tools for QA And Dev Teams

Generating the right test data is a critical challenge for QA and development teams. Without realistic, compliant, and well-managed data, testing can yield misleading results or miss crucial bugs. You don’t want your customer sign-up to fail because it never occurred...

Entry and Exit Criteria in Software Testing, Explained

Release entry and exit criteria are important components of software development projects that help ensure successful releases. To release a new software version, it is crucial to have clear criteria for when you initiate a release (entry criteria). Additionally, you...

5 Software Tools for Test Data Management (TDM)

Hit Subscribehit.subscribeEdit Profile Test data management (TDM) has become a critical component of modern software quality assurance (QA) and development workflows. As applications grow more complex and compliance requirements tighten, organizations need reliable...

7 Synthetic Data Generation Tools for Dev & Testing

In software development and testing, having access to high-quality, realistic data is crucial. But real production data is often sensitive, regulated, or simply unavailable for testing purposes. Synthetic data generation tools provide a powerful alternative, enabling...