Leaders in agile organizations should consider adding lean techniques to their DevOps practices. Lean thinking can accelerate DevOps delivery by providing a set of processes and principles to help create more beneficial products, save money, boost productivity, reduce waste, and map to value.

Shifting left has been focused on testing proprietary code earlier. But at what point in the lifecycle are you checking your open source compliance and ensuring you do not have security vulnerabilities? If you shift this process left and perform it earlier in your software development lifecycle, just like with testing, you can see the same benefits of saving time, money, and headaches.

Product development team members are often focused on the component level, but understanding the whole system is a challenge. Forming cross-disciplinary integrated product teams can provide support for large and small efforts in either agile or traditional development, helping teams achieve total system lifecycle expertise.

There’s good reason DevOps is an emerging trend in the IT industry—it alleviates prevalent problems, such as operational waste, and emphasizes collaboration, communication, and visibility. Uday Kumar details how he became a believer in DevOps by recalling the rocky road he took on his way to adoption.