Although some people consider Agile and DevOps to keep their positions in opposite corners of the boxer ring, their antagonism is exaggerated. By denying the stereotypes created by the oversimplified definitions, we can see that these approaches can become best friends in your organization.
A report commissioned by a CA company shows that there is much in common in the benefits of using Agile and DevOps in IT companies across Europe. Most of the organizations agreed that combining Agile and DevOps is streamlining the processes and clarifying them. Many businesses make a single manager responsible for both Agile and DevOps, and it is also evidence of their similarity and interconnection.
Let’s go a bit deeper into each approach’s features and find out the new opportunities opened by their combination.
First, let’s unhook “Scrum Only” from Agile
The total identifying SCRUM with Agile is like saying that a wheel and a car are the same things. SCRUM is the software development model with defined iterations and the most popular framework of Agile approaches. But Agile itself is a philosophy of the development process and a much broader concept.
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Second, DevOps is more than Continuous Delivery
Connecting the operations team to the development, DevOps are the efficient link in the value-delivery chain. Contrary to specific tools, DevOps keeps the project’s value in mind as a whole and is permanently holding the line of all the implementation processes to the primary meaning of the solution.
Common or different: which prevails?
If there are so many misunderstandings in definitions, maybe the conflict between Agile and DevOps is also a fiction?
There are differences, like:
- Different starting points: Agile begins with a developer, while DevOps typically from Operations.
- The way of problem-solving: Agile looks to people, while DevOps’ view is through holistic systems.
- The opinion on the tools for increasing the speed of the processes and their automation: DevOps uses the tools effectively while most of the agilists reconcile with them, at best.
- Agile consider the problems to be extensive while DevOps goes from the stability of the process and looks for specific points for improvement.
Nevertheless, the prognosis says that the future of business-oriented software development involves cross-functional teams with merged Agile and DevOps approaches.
The combination of Agile and DevOps: does the industry matter?
There are benefits of such a synthesis for any customer-oriented field of informational technology.
For example, in the healthcare industry, DevOps takes over the qualitative integration of software development with operational efficiency. Restricted by many regulations, healthcare projects often need the analytical approach to find the bottlenecks and avoid them. The security of all the operations is also crucial when it comes to personal data, and DevOps implementation enables the transparency of data handling together with the protection of data storage. The customer’s right to delete any of the personal details is also taken into consideration. Such a thorough customer-oriented approach enables determining the best way of the product’s functioning and achieving it. Many human errors are eliminated, the compliance checks are simplified, and the operational overhead is significantly reduced.
How Can DevOps Contribute to Agile?
- By their support, DevOps engineers can speed up the deployment systems delivery at the end of the Scrum cycle. By eliminating non-effective deployment, organizations can benefit significantly from implementing DevOps methods.
- A well-organized Continuous Delivery process enables deployment of the code from commit to production in several minutes. Depending on the scope of the changes made, it is a significant acceleration and a definite advantage.
- The features of the 24 h Kanban cycle are ideally suited for DevOps, and the merging at this stage gives the stakeholders the complete visibility of the processes, the tasks’ prioritization, and the stage of execution.
Combining Agile and DevOps by creating cross-functional teams is necessary, despite all the prejudices. DevOps approach decreases the product’s time to market and enables the organization’s getting all the benefits of Agile principles in the workflow.
Though the two branches of a similar philosophy were going different ways for years, together, they can evolve, giving the new advantages to custom software development.