At the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016 in San Francisco, Mik Kersten is talking about Agile tooling and ways his company, Tasktop, is helping to provide the infrastructure and support that organizations need to successfully scale DevOps. We jumped at the opportunity to speak with Kersten about how he sees the DevOps adoption movement trending.
Understanding the DevOps evolution
Kersten has always waxed philosophically about the Agile movement, and given the fact that Tasktop is now heavily involved in the DevOps world, the question arose as whether he viewed the DevOps movement as simply a natural evolution of Agile. "Yes and no," said Kersten, asserting that while initially some vendors tried to promote DevOps adoption as more of an end to end, application lifecycle management solution, DevOps is now fairly universally recognized as being a means for providing continuous integration and continuous delivery between development teams and operations teams, just as the name implies.
But regardless of how DevOps may have been promoted or hyped by both vendors and advocates, the people who are doing DevOps well are succeeded at it and have no illusions about what DevOps is and what DevOps isn't. "The people who are practicing DevOps today really do think of it as this layer that drives continuous delivery, including the automation, the practices and the cultural stuff that is needed," Kersten said.
Instigating Agile transformations
DevOps itself is a fairly self-contained set of processes, and it can be defined independently without a dependency on a discussion about the Agile method or ALM. But that doesn't mean there isn't a certain synergy between these concepts, or more importantly, the individuals who are successfully championing these causes.
The people who are embracing DevOps in the organizations are the ones who are driving the bigger picture transformations.
Mik KerstenCEO, Tasktop
"What is interesting in terms of the bigger picture is that those same people who are embracing DevOps in the organizations are the ones who are driving the bigger picture transformations which are large-scale Agile, enterprise Agile and larger lean transformations," Kersten said. So while DevOps itself may be more of an insular set of processes, when teams encounter success with their DevOps adoption, that success becomes a springboard for transformative change across the enterprise, and more often than not, that enterprise level change is an Agile one.
To find out more about how organizations are making large scale DevOps adoption work, along with insights on how to avoid DevOps failures and information on how Docker and container technology is impacting the world of DevOps tooling, listen to the accompanying podcast between TheServerSide's Cameron McKenzie and Tasktop CEO Mik Kersten.
