Scaling Agile

As the video industry experiences another phase of significant disruption and evolution can it adapt to the changes in technology, consumer behaviour and the competitive landscape by using software development practises such as Agile and DevOps to drive innovation and sustain growth?

We are serialising our whitepaper ‘Agile and DevOps within the Video Industry’ here over the next X weeks. If you cannot wait, then you can download the whole whitepaper now at http://www.fairmilewest.com/2015/11/agile-devops-within-video-industry-whitepaper/.

Last time we talked about Agile Adoption and Maturity and this time we are looking at Scaling Agile.

A recent study by S3 TV Technology confirmed that many operators are moving towards more frequent releases per year “50% of operators are deploying more frequently than a year ago” as they adopt Agile methodologies and approaches to delivering TV products.

While this increase in cadence and velocity of releases is great for consumers who get better products with more incremental upgrades, it can impact other areas of an organisation as different departments adapt to these faster release cycles.

Operations departments are now being asked to manage many more code deployments than they have previously which in turn is driving the adoption of DevOps toolsets and approaches which can help with automating many aspects of traditional operations activities.

DevOps, like Agile, is a significant cultural change for most organizations. Successful adoption of DevOps practises breaks down organizational barriers or silos between development teams and operations teams. As Sanjay Ravindran, Head of Delivery and Operations at Freesat says – “Ultimately it’s about culture change – changing the mindset of the teams to think more in terms of projects for Ops rather than just keeping the lights on, and the project teams to consider the impacts on Live of their deployments.”

From our interviews we learned that the adoption of DevOps for most organizations is still at the very early stages. Most organizations have not fully embraced the idea of embedding operations people into SCRUM teams, many are running a DevOps team who support other SCRUMs with deployment automation and infrastructure. The lack of shared ownership and responsibility with this approach, some would say, is the antithesis of the true principles of DevOps.

In the mobile video app world in-life app updates are a Business As Usual (BAU) activity with most consumers expecting regular updates with new features, UI enhancements, bug fixes and performance improvements. To illustrate this point the graph below shows the number of releases for a number of popular mobile video apps over the last 3 years:

Data source: SensorTower

It’s not just mobile apps that can be updated as often as this though, Kristan Bullett, Group Head of Architecture at Piksel says – “For our own products we can deploy up to 20 times a day in production but for most tier 1 operators that’s not desirable”

While adoption of Agile and DevOps has enabled many organisations to increase the pace of their delivery it is the new advancements in cloud platforms and automation technologies that have enabled these organizations to scale up their infrastructure and deployment capabilities.

Next time we will look at Cloud and automation technologies or you can skip straight to getting the Whitepaper in full by downloading it at http://www.fairmilewest.com/2015/11/agile-devops-within-video-industry-whitepaper/.

To find out how Fairmile West can help you adopt and embrace the right approaches for your organization and projects please contact info@fairmilewest.com.