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DevOps and Agile are both meant to increase the time to market so that there are more frequent releases and more revenue generation. However, that’s pretty much the only thing that’s common between the two methodologies. Hence, the debate about which is better and why.
With the emerging trend of DevOps consulting companies, we need to understand what both these terms actually mean before we dig into their differences and find out whether DevOps will replace Agile at all. So, here’s a concise understanding of Agile and DevOps before you opt for DevOps consulting services.
What is Agile?
Agile practices aim to understand requirements and deliver solutions through collaborative efforts of cross-functional teams and the end-user. The Agile methodology promotes adaptive planning and evolutionary development for early delivery and continuous improvement.
But most importantly, Agile development inspires to be more receptive of change. In order to better understand what Agile stands for, we need to go through the twelve principles that The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is based on.
These twelve principles are:
- Early and continuous delivery of software for customer satisfaction
- Welcome changes in requirements at any stage
- Frequent delivery of working software
- Improved coordination between developers and business teams
- Building projects around trusted, motivated individuals
- Adopting co-location for face-to-face conversations instead of digital communication
- The working software is the metric for progress
- The constant pace of sustainable development
- Providing constant attention to both technical and design excellence
- Eliminating the unnecessary work to simplifying the process
- Self-organization for building the best architectures and designs
- Reflecting on how to be more effective and improve accordingly
These principles cover the entirety of what Agile is meant to be and now that we’ve understood that, let’s briefly go through what DevOps is.
What is DevOps?
DevOps practices combine software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to improve collaboration between the two. It is adopted to lessen the duration of the system development cycle to provide continuous delivery without compromising on quality.
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DevOps can be implemented across the entire delivery pipeline to achieve the desired results which may include:
- Improved frequency of deployment
- Increased speed to market
- Reduced failures in new releases
- Maximize efficiency and productivity
- Enhanced security
- Improved operational process maintenance
That’s how great DevOps is.
And that’s why most of the companies out there are adopting it fast. However, the question remains, will it replace Agile?
DevOps and Agile: A Complicated Relationship
Agile’s foundation is firmly grounded into development and it is meant to bring agility to the whole development process. DevOps, on the other hand, is meant for both Development and Operations, increasing the speed of work in both these stages.
When Agile was introduced it solved a great deal of problems and proved to be a highly valuable method for development companies and developers alike. However, with time, new challenges emerged and most of these challenges were due to the discord between the development and operations teams.
That’s when DevOps came into the picture – as an extension or successor to Agile, not as its replacement.
So, does this mean that DevOps is better than Agile? Of course, it is. Aren’t all successors are? (Unless the succession is based on blood rather than improvement in design)
What makes DevOps better than Agile?
In order to understand what makes DevOps better than Agile, we need to understand the challenges that Agile software development faces.
The best practices in Agile involve people working in Silos which hinders any kind of cross-team communication or collaboration. This creates the discord that is rampant in the Agile processes because people working on the same process have no idea about the different stages of it.
DevOps solutions eliminate this discord by creating an effective collaboration between the two stages and unifying the entire process as one. A DevOps services engineer works on everything from developing the code to testing and deploying it to production.
DevOps managed services become the sole owner of the product who is accountable for the whole process and understands the product best. This creates an enhanced work environment that not only improves the duration of the product life cycle but also makes it more efficient and effective.
