Include agency uses a combination of Agile methodologies and DevOps to increase our speed in delivering applications and services to market, usually in 2 or 3-week sprint cycles. In simple terms, DevOps removes the barriers between traditionally siloed development and operations teams and instead combines them across the entire software application life cycle.
Being an agency that advocates headless design (frontend decoupled from the backend) in a composable environment, we utilise the MACH approach to future-proof enterprise technology where every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements. It’s the microservices approach which allows for more application flexibility and enables quicker innovation.
The building blocks of what we develop against, we create in Azure DevOps and categorise them into Epics, user stories, and tasks, with each user story or task also capturing the success criteria for the QA process. This process of capturing information with DevOps is what allows for accurate estimations of work, sprint planning, and real-time monitoring of progress through burndown charts.
DevOps brings with it a number of benefits. Apart from the ability to innovate faster and become more efficient at driving business results, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines can ensure quality within updates so that they can be deployed faster, and more reliably, without compromising the end-user experience.
The Improved collaboration between operations and the developers subsequently saves time and reduces inefficiencies within the process. DevOps also comes with its own project management and integrated security testing tools, so everything is contained within the one application.