DEVOPSdigest

Why Agile? DEVOPSdigest asked the experts for their opinions on what are the most important advantages of being Agile. Part 2 is all about speed.

Start with The Top Advantages of Being Agile - Part 1

FASTER FIXES

The biggest advantage of being Agile is an improved ability to implement software fixes and adjustments quickly and easily. There are many statistics showing the impact of poorly performing (slow) software products, and conversely, many others demonstrating very positive outcomes when performance is improved. As one example, BBC reports they lose ten percent of users for every additional second of page load time, while Pinterest's recent success in improving site speed by 40 percent has increased account sign-ups by 15 percent. Performance is so vital that organizations cannot afford to spend a lot of time implementing needed fixes. By then, users will have moved on. This nimbleness requires DevOps teams to have tools promptly alerting them to performance issues before, during and after production – ideally before users are impacted.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint(link is external)

At a micro-level, one of the greatest advantages agility gives an organization is the ability through things like Continuous Integration, to detect and eliminate errors rapidly.
Richard Whitehead
Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft(link is external)

CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

A top advantage of being an agile development team is that such teams are best suited for the automation of the delivery process known as continuous delivery. The benefits of implementing continuous delivery within an overall agile team are multiple and include: higher quality output, faster time to market, and the ability to experiment, fail fast and resolve issues quickly. The short cycles, smaller teams and collaborative nature of Agile lends itself perfectly to automation of the build and delivery process. In turn, agile teams gain increased visibility, a more complete definition of "done" and the ability to focus on delivering value to end-users.
Brian Dawson
DevOps Evangelist, CloudBees(link is external)

For DevOps, being agile is a byproduct of robust process automation and a certain comfort level teams have in the ability to ship code on short notice. This provides DevOps teams with the ability to spend more time testing processes and recovery plans, plus a greater focus on general improvement of the underlying infrastructure environment. This is a key advantage to being agile – automation leads to agility, meaning new applications are delivered more often.
Andrew Marshall
Director of Product Marketing, Cedexis(link is external)

The greatest advantage to being agile are small multifunctional teams delivering working software on a regular basis and business benefits from the working software. The development team benefits from the discipline and communication skills required to deliver working software at regular intervals. The organization benefits from practices that drive pride of ownership and successful outcomes for all stakeholders. Brilliant!
William C. Hurley
Senior Director of Enterprise Technology Solutions, Astadia(link is external)

FASTER TIME TO MARKET

The greatest advantage of being agile is the ability to reduce the time to market for new applications and features. Technology has increased the speed at which innovation is occurring. DevOps and the agility that it brings allow businesses and IT practices to shorten the development and production cycles for products. Agility provides the speed that businesses need to stay competitive. Today, technology means digital transformation. Businesses are leveraging technology to change how they provide products and services. In the hyper-competitive world of IT delivered solutions, businesses need agile processes. Agility means that businesses can quickly respond to challengers and maintain their competitive edge.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware(link is external)

For an IT organization, the number 1 requirement for improving customer experiences is speed to market, with the IT organization moving quickly and adjusting to customer expectations and demands. Waterfall and XP do not enable teams to respond to customer expectations and demands nimbly and productively. To be agile is to be superior, as companies are decreasing time to market and meeting customer needs as quickly as possible.
Joe McCann
CEO, NodeSource(link is external)

Running an Agile IT organization is fundamental in aligning Business and IT, business will always look for faster releases and quicker adoption of new technologies. Agile in practice will enable a faster route to market for new applications.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CEO, Apica(link is external)

The biggest advantage of being agile for a DevOps team is that we arrive at the right solution faster and with higher quality. By doing quick inspect and adapt iterations, we don't waste time building something that our customer doesn't want or need. In the old days, we would put a spec together with the customer, take months to build a complex system and inevitably after inspection, the customer would tell us that this was not really what they wanted. With agile, this still happens but in much, much shorter cycles -- we're only at risk of wasting, at most, one sprint's worth of time building the wrong thing.
Joe Alfaro
VP of Engineering, Sauce Labs(link is external)

The only way to remain competitive in the digital economy is to move quickly. That's how a company gains market share and grows sales. But fail-fast and accelerating the service deployment pipeline leads to increased chaos in operations. To benefit from agility, you need to control this chaos by utilizing IP traffic based technologies for continuous and real-time visibility into service-level telemetry as well as insight to establish effective feedback loops between Dev, QA, Security and Ops. When doing so, it is possible to deliver services faster and compete with confidence.
Ron Lifton
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout(link is external)

FASTER TIME TO REVENUE

For enterprises with wide area networks (WANs) the biggest advantage of agility is faster time to revenue. While agility in all operations is desirable, speed in the initial deployment phase is the most valuable. The concept of zero touch deployment describes the highly-automated sequence of operations from generic, physical, or virtual platforms to geographically dispersed operating network elements. A DevOps approach and network function virtualization are keys to achieving zero touch deployment and WAN agility.
Erik Thoen
Director, Product Management, 128 Technology(link is external)

ACCELERATE BUSINESS

The great advantage of being agile is the multiple feedback loops you establish and how it can accelerate your business. The first set of feedback loops are between your delivery teams and your stakeholders to ensure the teams are delivering the right things (value), delivering the right way (quality), and continuing to improve on this capability. But what many don't realize is the second set of feedback loops that come into play later as elements of the business (engineering, support, marketing, sales, etc.) establish stronger feedback loops internally to build a shared perspective and see trends that competitors cannot easily see. This is when truly disruptive innovation occurs, grows and accelerate your business.
Mark Kilby
Agile Coach, Sonatype(link is external)

Go to The Top Advantages of Being Agile - Part 3, showing how Agile enables you to adapt to change.