Agile practitioners have called for disruptive thinking, innovations, and adoption of critical tools such as DevOps and cloud computing, as a means to disrupt parochial status quos that limit organizational growth.
This was made known at a two-day Agile DevOps Day 2020 organized recently in Lagos, by the Agile Practitioners of Nigeria (APAON), with the theme: “Accelerating Your Delivery”.
Speaking at the event, Director at Cognetiks Consulting, Obi Ikegulu, said that DevOps as a culture of practice in systems development likewise Agile helps to increase velocity, reduces downtimes and human errors during program processes.
“Consider DevOps as the tools for continuous production, integration, delivery. Agile is a practice also that involves the Scrum masters. Now, how cloud comes to play is to make the whole process easier like building in an environment. The Google Cloud, the Azure, etc., are meant to make life easier for companies and even save costs. So, the cloud makes automation easier,” he said.
According to Obi, companies that are yet to fully adopt Agile practice, DevOps and Cloud Computing may find it difficult to compete in the market within the next five years as trends have shown emerging technologies will take tolls on such organizations.
Furthermore, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft Nigeria, Ifeanyi Aneke, said that with DevOps, organizations can be assured of end-to-end advantages, as it offers them the software development and information technology operations opportunity to shorten the systems development life cycle and improve continuous delivery with higher software quality.
“The difference is the problem it solves. We use it in Microsoft and we have seen tremendous changes internally. We built it for ourselves but now want others to join us in enjoying the advantages. Our solutions are better and we release more often now than previously and much more responsive to customer feedback. This is being reflected in our processes.
“Companies in Nigeria and Diaspora should come to use Azure. This solution is actually for every company, especially the SMEs. In fact, it will even be better for SMEs. Why? Microsoft understands that sometimes, an SME might not be able to spend much money; so, if you have less than five people like developers, you get it for free. Microsoft grants you access to grow. We have a one-free pipeline with unlimited repositories”, he explained.
Speaking on the “African Culture vs African Corporate Culture,” Victor Nwandu, pointed out that lots of businesses are failing due to poor time management, inability to pay attention to processes and details. “Businesses in Africa, presently, we do not have an option except to adopt agile technologies or watch the company die.”
Founder/Chief Executive Officer, The Agile Advisor Africa/Chairman, Agile Practitioners Association of Nigeria, Mrs. Abiodun Osoba, appreciating the guests on their turnout, stressed that the conference was convened to enable practitioners to learn from and connect with people who are passionate about uncovering better ways of working and executing projects.
Speakers at the event included Evan Leybourn, Victor Nwandu, Son of Osemwegie, Ady Dike, Chijoke Eke, Olatunde Adekunle, Bamidele Fatoba, Auditor General, Antoinette Coetzee, Itopa Sule, Eliana Philip-Amulum, Carol Ariyibi, and many others.
