Agile Teams use DevOps to implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery which helps them to launch their products at a faster rate into the market.
The main reason DevOps is adopted are Predictability, Maintainability, Time to market, Quality Improvement and Resilience.
The DevOps Lifecycle covers many important life cycle phases like Development, Testing, Integration, Deployment & Monitoring.
But many times misses out on the End of product or service life. Here we try to Explore the ESOL in more detail.
End of service or product Life a is the decision of many times taken by the Business Representative – either a Scrum Master or a Product Owner or a Sponsor. There could be various reasons for deciding the End of a service or a product Life which may include:
- Product being obsolete
- Compliance or regulatory issues
- Unable to sustain the cost of maintenance
- Alternate service or product available
- Competitive disadvantage and subsequent loss of business with no chance of revival
- Technology being obsolete Etc
Product or service End of Life is treated as a story like other conditions
- The story will say why e.g. no more business need, replacement by cheaper/simpler/more effective service
- The story will say what the conditions are e.g.
- what happens to any data / documentation / tools / other components?
- how to ensure any replacement service is ready before close down old ?
- When to close down and in which sequence
- Backing up the data related to the END OF service LIFE
- Retention of data
Other things which may need to be done are:
- Communication to the relevant stakeholders
- Documentation to re-initiate the service – just in case there is a decision to re-initiate
- Retrospective on why the service has to be terminated if the termination is due to performance reason
- Releasing the resources back to Operations (e.g. used up servers, memory, database etc) so that no more cost is accrued for the service
- Releasing the Human resources back to the HR
- Creating a ROI report if relevant. Etc
The End of Product or Service Life should never be ignored. The more the delay in deciding the End of Product or Service Life, it may lead to more accrual of the cost for product or service..