Mar 14, 2024 - From: GitLab.com - Amanda Rueda

Ditch your legacy planning tool: Get Agile with GitLab

Discover how Agile planning in a DevSecOps platform unlocks traceability from idea to implementation, providing a holistic view of your strategy in action.

When organizations are trying to get a better handle on their software development workflows — struggling with bottlenecks and silos, not being able to integrate customer feedback fast enough, and lacking project visibility — they just might turn to Agile planning. It’s a solid way to increase collaboration, foster iterations, and speed value delivery.

Agile planning, though, works even better when done in conjunction with a DevSecOps platform and the methodologies that come along with it. There’s no need to choose one or the other. In fact, they are designed to work together, and both focus on continuous improvement, collaboration, and team empowerment. A DevSecOps platform helps you bring an Agile mindset to software delivery.

What problems can Agile planning and a DevSecOps platform tackle?

First off, let’s look at some challenges teams take on with a combination of Agile planning tools and a DevSecOps platform:

• Inefficiencies and bottlenecks - With context switching between a multitude of tools and a lack of visibility into teams’ work and workflows, it’s hard to see bottlenecks where time and effort is being wasted.
• Silos and lack of collaboration - If planning and development are happening in different places and with different tools, it’s much more difficult for teams to work together to improve efficiency and deployment speed.
• Problems scaling up - When teams and workflows are growing, it can be difficult to enable cross-functional work that will keep up with increasing demands.
• Problems with communication - When stakeholders don’t have insight and the ability to comment in the early planning stage of a project, engaging with them becomes inefficient and their valuable views are lost.
• Losing track of resources - Without visibility into how teams’ time and work are allocated, it’s easy to lose sight of how valuable resources are being allocated — or even wasted.
• Keeping up with reports - Without automation to help teams keep up with progress reports, it can be highly taxing to get needed, organized reports on time.

Both Agile planning tools and a DevSecOps platform focus on bringing customer-facing teams, product teams, and development teams together to accelerate customer feedback into production and speed up development through iterations. Each one works really well, but together they’re even more powerful.

Learning from Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain Inc., a U.S.-based enterprise information management services company, has embraced Agile methods, but was looking to simplify their fragmented tooling to gain a single view of software development workflows. With an eye on reducing the costs associated with infrastructure management, while also securely increasing production velocity, the company, which has more than 225,000 customers worldwide, adopted a DevSecOps platform to scale their Agile framework. The platform enabled their Agile methodologies, and Agile supported their evolution to DevOps.

“GitLab has provided us with the foundation and platform to enable our scaled Agile framework,” says Hayelom Tadesse, Iron Mountain’s vice president of enterprise technology. “We are able to collaborate within our Enterprise IT teams and our key stakeholders.”

How Agile planning + a DevSecOps platform helps organizations

Agile is a software development mindset that calls for iterative changes and updates. Instead of creating an initial, one-and-only plan that is seen all the way through the software development lifecycle, Agile planning leaves room to adapt through the development phase, based on feedback from cross-functional teams and customers. Simply put, Agile planning comes into play in every phase of development.

And an end-to-end DevSecOps platform fosters collaboration, breaks down silos, and offers visibility into what is happening throughout the software development lifecycle. When you incorporate Agile planning inside the framework of a DevSecOps platform, it’s easier and more efficient to plan, organize, track, and measure work.

By combining Agile and a DevSecOps platform, organizations can:

• Optimize workflows by enabling a unified view of DevSecOps metrics to resolve process bottlenecks and achieve business goals faster. A DevSecOps platform, like GitLab, can solve challenges such as fragmented tooling, gaps that block development and operations communications, administrative burdens, and difficulties with efficiently securing complex pipeline deployments.
• Unlock collaboration to break down silos and drive organizational outcomes. Cross-functional teams work side-by-side in GitLab, fostering open communication and real-time feedback. By sharing ideas and iterating on work from the inception of ideas to deployment to production, everyone remains on the same page.
• Simplify design work since design teams can share mockups, gather feedback, and ensure software alignment with business objectives, all within a single platform.
• Enable value stream management by empowering teams with metrics and insights. A platform helps teams ship better software faster and focus on delivering customer value.
• Gain actionable insights to drive continuous improvement across the entire software delivery process. By bringing Agile planning into a DevSecOps platform, code merges are effortlessly linked to issues, ensuring complete visibility and a user-friendly view of a project’s current status.

Integrated Agile capabilities bring teams together, fostering a culture of collaboration, transparency, and efficiency. And, within a single platform, it empowers teams to work together, deliver value faster, and ultimately, create software that truly matters.