It’s that time of the year again—the Gartner Hype Cycle is here to give us a snapshot of the world of Agile and DevOps and a better understanding of the maturity of the strategies and technologies in the space.
Every year, Gartner provides a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications in the Agile and DevOps space, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. They call it a Hype Cycle. This methodology is designed to give a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals.
In this year’s report we see feature management, which has been steadily climbing the slope of enlightenment for years, further incorporating experimentation and starting to intersect technologies like GenAI and AI Code Assistants.
Let’s climb the heady peak of inflated expectations, trek the slope of enlightenment, and try our best to get to the plateau of productivity as we take a tour of some of the learnings from this year’s report.
Feature Management Plus Experimentation Continues To Go Mainstream
In the 2024 report, Feature Management is placed on the slope of enlightenment for the second year in a row. It is viewed as a high-value “early mainstream” strategy. Before we dive into what’s new, let’s cover what remains from 2023.
In a world of Agile software development where teams are in a mindset of “deploy early, deploy often,” engineers can use feature management to decouple delivery from deployment to avoid slowing down software teams, with the added benefit of de-risking releases. With a feature management practice enabled by the LaunchDarkly platform, it also enables the implementation of best practices like teams using feature flags to “Adopt progressive release practices to reduce change impacts and support earlier delivery.” Tools like Release Assistant help engineering leaders define their team’s best practices as enforceable workflows (in the form of release pipelines) applied to every single flag to better enable progressive release practices.
So, beyond the core of feature management, what’s new?
Feature management can deliver value to almost any type of business in the form of faster, safer software delivery—it’s a maturing practice with well-defined value. But experimentation is called out as a key element of the feature management paradigm, as a way to create feedback loops to inform product and feature development. As the report says, “The biggest potential impact comes from the improved ability to select valuable features for development, based on feedback loops from feature monitoring in production to development planning.”
To learn more about how LaunchDarkly continues to integrate powerful experimentation capabilities into feature management, take a look at some of our recent releases. In the 2024 report, Feature Management is placed on the slope of enlightenment for the second year in a row. It is viewed as a high-value “early mainstream” strategy.
“Although feature flags were originally used to disable features that were not ready for deployment, they are now also used for experimentation, testing and progressive release. Features are being monitored and tested for value throughout their life cycle, creating feedback loops that aid in feature design.” - Gartner, Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps, 2024
Ascendant AI-Powered Developer Tools Come With New Opportunities & Risks
While AI is top of mind for just about every software development team, whether they’re using tools like AI code assistants or building new GenAI-powered applications, there are “few top practices surrounding the use of AI in Agile and DevOps,” according to the report.
As AI code assistants become more ubiquitous, the report mentions that engineering teams are adopting the tools to “enhance work environments by reducing stress from repetitive tasks” and “enable developers to focus on innovative solutions by automating mundane tasks”
At LaunchDarkly, we’ve taken this to heart. We give users of the LaunchDarkly VS Code Extension and GitHub VS Code Extension the ability to interact with Github Copilot inside VS Code. This powerful AI tool automates some of the mental load and manual actions associated with more repeatable tasks in the management of a flag’s lifecycle.
Exploring The Terrain of Innovation
To learn more about what’s new and what’s next in the world of DevOps and Agile methodologies, we highly recommend jumping into the report and exploring adoption drivers, obstacles, and user recommendations for feature management and other emerging technologies.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT
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Gartner, Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps, 2024, 5 August 2024, Keith Mann Et Al.
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