DevOps vs Agile – understanding the difference
DevOps, is a latest buzzword that has been trending in the software industry for some years now. But in-spite of it’s popularity, there is still a lot of confusion about to how different Devops is from Agile. However the DevOps vs Agile, is a never ending debate in the IT industry.
While both the methodologies have a lot in common, there are some notable Agile and DevOps differences. In this post we are trying to outline, how Agile and DevOps operate independently and the key differences between them.
What is Agile?
Agile is a software development methodology that focuses on an iterative and incremental approach to software development or project management. It was introduced as an alternative to the traditional old waterfall methodology. Agile process breaks the product into smaller pieces and integrates them for final testing.
There are four core values that form the base for Agile development process:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
What is DevOps?
DevOps can be defined as a software development culture where the Development and the Operations team work together to improve collaboration and productivity. It can be called as joint (collaborative) responsibility between development, testing, automation and operations team to make the software development and deployment process more faster and smooth.
Unlike traditional software development, DevOps focus on a continuous cycle of building, testing, deploying, and monitoring software. DevOps’ main objective is to deliver quality software efficiently.
A typical Devops lifecycle involves the following processes:
- Continuous development
- Continuous testing
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous monitoring
- Continuous feedback
Differences between DevOps and Agile
| Parameter | DevOps | Agile |
| Definition | Devops involves collaboration between the Development and Operation teams. | Agile methodology talks about iterative development and focus on collaboration, customer feedback, small, and rapid releases |
| Purpose | Devops manages end to end SDLC process from development to deployment to operations & monitoring. | Agile is used to manage complex projects mostly limited to development, testing and deployment process. |
| Teams Involved | Devops involves bigger and larger teams and responsible for collaboration between them. | Agile works best in smaller team size.The smaller the team ,lesser would be members and hence faster would be development, testing and deployment. |
| Implementation | Devops normally does not follow any standard frameworks. | Agile supports multiple frameworks and can be implemented using Scrum, Kanban, Lean, TDD etc |
| Target areas | Devops is involved in complete end to end development process(Development ,testing, CI/CD, deployment, monitoring and operations) ensuring faster delivery. | Mostly during the software development process. |
| Feedback Mechanism | Feedback mostly comes from within the teams internally. | Agile ensures direct feedback from the customer. |
| Duration | Devops aims to achieve smooth development and deployment process within defined deadlines. The code is ideally deployed daily or every few hours | gile is carried out in units called ’Sprints’. A Sprint duration is normally less than a month, ideally 2 weeks. |
| Shift left principle | Devops supports both Left as well as Right shift. | Agile only works on Shift-Left principle. |
| Automation | Automation is an important part of Devops process. | Agile’s main focus is on speed and agility and does not emphasize on automation. |
| Popular Tools | Devops involves a wide variety of tools , most popular ones being: Git, Jenkins,Puppet, Ansible,Terraform, Nagios,Zabbbix, ELK etc | Commonly used Agile tools are: JIRA,Versionone,LeanKit,Bugzilla, Codegiant etc |
Final Conclusion:
Both Agile and Devops aim at delivering quality software within a defined timeline. Where Agile focuses on optimizing the development life-cycle, Devops provide a collaborative environment for the development and operations team to work together and ensure faster software delivery using processes like CI/CD, continuous testing and monitoring.
But the key takeaway here is that both DevOps and Agile are not mutually exclusive and they can coexist within an organization. So any organization transitioning to a DevOps way should not completely abandon existing Agile workflows. DevOps can be considered as an extension of Agile built around the practices that are not in Agile’s focus.
