Businesses are increasingly attempting to realize the transformative potential offered by agile and DevOps. The result is that agile and DevOps can no longer be viewed as emergent perspective but have become an established set of practices and tools that enable businesses to create customer value more reliably.
Despite this, there are challenges involved in realizing this potential. For instance, because agile and DevOps have become the default approaches to building and operating software, it’s important that their supporting practices suit everyone in all parts of the organization. Meanwhile, the scarcity of talent means automation and machine learning have a crucial role to play.
Gartner® ‘Hype Cycle™ for Agile and DevOps, 2022’ report characterizes this challenge that software engineering leaders face as needing to work with fewer people to “do more things involving more complexity for more stakeholders than ever before”. Gartner notes that this is causing automation and AI innovations to rise to the peak of the Hype Cycle, while cautioning businesses that they need to consider whether these technologies are suitable for their organization at their existing maturity.
Maximum results
Given the challenges businesses face, it’s not a surprise that they are not only seeking innovations that address these, but also looking to ensure their efforts deliver maximum results in the least amount of time. Gartner report has identified the innovations that can most benefit businesses, as well as the timeline in which these innovations will become mature enough to deliver this value.
When it comes to achieving the maximum transformational benefit in the least amount of time, application performance monitoring (APM) and configuration automation (CCA) is rated High on benefit rating in the Gartner report, with both offering high levels of benefit and being within two years of mainstream adoption.
APM and CCA
Gartner Hype Cycle notes that CCA enhances the efficiency and reliability of deployments, while APM provides valuable insights into the behavior of software in production.
With APM in place, businesses gain extremely detailed views into their use of applications and the end-user experience, while CCA codifies and continuously applies compliance policies into the DevOps delivery pipeline.
Florin Stefan, Applications Director at Stefanini EMEA, says: “We believe, Gartner Hype Cycle reflects our experience – businesses can enjoy transformative benefits through the application of agile and DevOps, but many face barriers when it comes to realizing the full potential of these, whether that’s a result of the difficulty in ensuring the entire organization is on the same page, the challenge of embracing the correct innovations for their current maturity level or gaining access to the required skills.
“Given these challenges, it’s understandable that technology leaders will look to identify the new developments in agile and DevOps that can deliver the maximum benefits in the quickest time. Equally, we believe businesses should seek the immediate benefits of embracing well-established innovations, while simultaneously planning for the long term. Such an approach is crucial to realizing the full potential of agile and DevOps, both now and in the future.”
Table 1: Priority Matrix for Agile and DevOps, 2022
Gartner, Hype Cycle for DevOps and Agile, 2022, 13 July 2022, Keith Mann, Joachim Herschmann, Akis Sklavounakis
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