Both Agile and DevOps are utilized in the software development process. As it is a long and arduous process, multiple components require to be developed simultaneously within a short deadline. Lots of planning goes into this even before the development starts, such as deciding the approach to the whole process, explaining the tasks involved, and identifying the people to be included. Apart from this, setting the deadline and providing the benchmark of assessment is some other major components in the development process that reduce the time-to-market aspect of the final product. To approach all this and comfortably plan out the software development life cycle. The best approach is to use both Agile and DevOps together so that the characteristics of both concepts come into play in solving a problem in the process as well as the organization. Making use of both concepts adds to higher levels of flexibility in the process and realizes the fact that there is no specific solution to solve all the needs within an organization.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a software development method in which the IT professionals collaborate among themselves focusing on communication and integration to enable rapid deployment of products.
The Collaboration between development and operations teams are promoted in DevOps culture. This results in an efficient, speedy and automated deployment of code to production. It helps to increase the delivery speed of an organization. As the name indicates, it is a collaboration between development and IT operations.
The advantages of DevOps
By creating a more dynamic development ecosystem that is primarily focused on the exact business objectives which avoid human error from the project lifecycle, DevOps enables organizations to:
- Reduce the implementation time of new services from months to minutes.
- Increase the productivity of a business and IT teams.
- Save costs on maintenance and upgrades, and eliminate unnecessary capital expenditure.
- Standardize processes for easy replication and faster delivery.
- Improve quality, reliability and reusability of all system components.
- Increase the rate of success for digitalization strategies and transformation projects.
- Ensure that money invested in cloud infrastructure, analytics and data management is not wasted.
DevOps is the ideal approach for government IT projects and for large scale private implementations as it delivers the value in much early phase of the project lifecycle. It provides continuous improvement and operational flexibility which helps accelerate new services, providing innovative and cost-effective ways for delivering value through updated ways of development and operations.
What is Agile?
It is one of the software development methods, which focuses on multiple short- term development life cycles. Having short life cycles helps the quality of a product. These life cycles prioritize the feedback that we receive from consumers and let us make respective changes in the product faster. What makes Agile much more efficient over its counterparts is that it has a much smaller life cycle, making the products much easier to test, achieving quicker feedback, and capturing the market early.
The advantages of Agile
- Better transparency. The more consistent we are with releasing new and quality
- The products, the more will be the trust laid on us by consumers or clients.
- Predicts cost and schedules tasks. Agile achieves this as it has a smaller life
- Cycles. The long-duration projects might involve unforeseen variables that can
- Affect the budget and the time of project completion.
- Allows for change. Agile makes the products more adaptable to future revisions
- As per market requirements.
- Improves quality. Faster feedback loops put us on the track of consistent
- Improvement, hence producing quality products.
Difference between DevOps and Agile
Criteria | DevOps | Agile |
Meaning | A philosophy of software development, not a tool | A methodology of strategizing software development applied to its whole life cycle to increase efficiency |
Implementation | Does not have any framework; it is more of thought applied while implementation | Has many frameworks such as Scrum, Lean, etc. |
Teamwork | All members are trained equally on the same skills to shift the focus from departmental outcomes to organizational goals | The job is divided between different teams having different skill sets |
Emphasis | Aims to automate the whole process and maintain the morale of employees | Aims to deliver the product on time, using all available feedback |
Evaluation | Evaluated by employees themselves | Evaluated by customers or clients |
Tools used | Has many tools used in different combinations, e.g., Jenkins, Nagios, Ansible, etc. | Fewer tools, viz. ActiveCollab, JIRA, Agile Bench, Pivotal Tracker, etc., to create an Agile environment |
Goals | Aims to decrease the gap between Dev and Ops teams and work toward a single organizational goal | Meant for decreasing the gap between the understanding of developers, customers, and testers |
Let’s conclude on DevOps vs Agile
Agile and DevOps are entirely different concepts. When Agile refers to software building approach, DevOps collaborates development teams and operations teams together to deploy solutions to production faster. Though there are differences, the rapid release cycle of Agile can be supported using DevOps. Thus, they complement each other very well in an organization.
For more details on the topic go to Innovature’s Azure page.
