Do you know? RadixWeb reports that 61% of companies use Agile to achieve both software development and company-wide digital transformation. On the other hand, DevOps can cut your support case time by 60%, saving you time and money. So, comparing DevOps and Agile methodologies presents an interesting topic for discussion.
In this blog on DevOps vs. Agile, we will be seeing the similarities and differences between DevOps and Agile.
In this blog, we will discuss the following aspects:
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Now, let’s briefly learn about Agile and DevOps.
What is DevOps?
DevOps and Agile have fundamental differences. But, before diving into DevOps vs. Agile, let us first learn about DevOps. DevOps is a culture, a philosophy of software development. It is this philosophy that we follow while producing software. DevOps, basically, aims to provide better communication between the development team and the operations team.
DevOps brings together development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams to work collaboratively throughout the software development lifecycle This doesn’t mean that it gives a complete strategy for the implementation of the work as such. Rather, it facilitates a better exchange of information and tools among the teams and reduces the inefficiencies caused otherwise.
DevOps also aims to employ automation in every process involved in software development, and we know that automation brings increased productivity and cost optimization to any company.
Let’s see how DevOps principles work
- Collaboration and Communication: DevOps initiates collaboration and communication among development, operations, and other related teams. This ensures everyone works towards common goals and understands each other’s ideologies.
- Automated Tasks: By automating repetitive tasks, such as building, testing, and deployment processes, DevOps teams can help smooth the workflows and reduce human errors.
- Continuous Integration: DevOps teams use Continuous Integration (CI) to share code changes into a common repository frequently. After this, tests are run to ensure that the changes don’t have any errors.
- Continuous Delivery: Continuous Delivery goes beyond CI by automating the deployment process, making it easier for teams to quickly and reliably release software updates to production with less manual effort.
- Monitoring Performance: DevOps teams continuously monitor application performance, user feedback, and system metrics. This feedback helps in identifying the errors early, so that improvements can be done as soon as possible.
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You have learned in detail about DevOps in this DevOps vs Agile blog. Now, you will learn about Agile.
What is Agile?
Agile is one of the software development methodologies, which focuses on multiple short-term development life cycles. Having short life cycles improves the quality of a product. These life cycles prioritize the feedback that we receive from consumers and let us make respective changes on the product faster. Agile puts the customer first by constantly adapting development based on feedback and automating tasks for faster updates. What makes Agile much more efficient than 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.
Agile methodologies follow a few of the principles, which are as follows:
- Iterative Development: Break down big projects into bite-sized chunks. Agile teams break down the project into small, manageable parts called iterations or sprints.
- Customer Collaboration: To get customer input often to make sure that teams are on the right track. Regular feedback allows for making small changes and improvements throughout the software development process.
- Cross-Functional Teams: Agile teams are cross-functional, and thus, developers, designers, and others work together, which helps teams to be well organized and capable of delivering output independently.
- Adaptive Planning: After every feedback, agile teams start adjusting their work and follow up with the changes to be made based on it. This allows them to respond quickly to changing requirements and market conditions.
- Continuous Improvement: Build what matters most to the customer first, then proceed with the other tasks, which is what the Agile team follows.
Before moving on to the differences, let’s see what are the commonalities between DevOps and Agile. As we know, they have many things in common like sharing the same goals for a team, working on the customer feedback, and so on. We have figured out some of the common features between DevOps vs. Agile:
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Key Similarities Between DevOps and Agile Methodology
Let’s start this section of the blog with a question: if Agile is already available, why do we need DevOps, even though their goals are very similar? This is because Agile focuses on software development, whereas DevOps covers a wide range of duties. DevOps has to focus on everything from successful software deployment to customer feedback.
Testing & Automation
- Both DevOps and Agile actively operate in a fast, secure, and quality-assessed environment.
- They achieve this by integrating extensive testing into their routines.
- Automating tasks is very common in both, as it helps in producing speedy and better-quality results.
Teamwork & Communication
- Both DevOps and Agile support collaboration and communication among team members, for a seamless workflow.
- Agile promotes cross-functional teams with close collaboration between developers, testers, and business stakeholders.
- DevOps bridges the communication gap between development and operations teams for the software deployment process.
Step-by-Step Progress
- Agile follows a constantly checking and improving as-you-go technique by breaking down work into smaller, manageable chunks or sprints.
- DevOps also encourages adding new features or improvements one step at a time, which allows continuous integration, delivery, and deployment.
- Both methodologies believe in delivering results frequently.
Customer Focus
- Agile gives priority to customer responses and starts adding requirements.
- DevOps focuses on delivering features and fixes quickly, following up with customer needs.
- Both try their best to deliver value to end-users efficiently.
Continuous Improvement
- Agile and DevOps both promote a culture of continuous improvement.
- Agile teams regularly inspect and adapt during retrospectives.
- DevOps encourages continuous learning, experimentation, and feedback loops.
DevOps vs Agile
| Criteria | DevOps | Agile |
| Definition | DevOps bridges the gap between developers and operations teams, using automation to deliver software faster and more reliably | Agile is a process of flexible development in bites, with constant feedback to build what users truly need |
| Goals | Aims to decrease the gap between Dev and Ops teams and work toward a single organizational goals | Meant for decreasing the gap between the understanding of developers, customers, and testers |
| Implementation | Not have any framework; it is more of a thought applied while implementation | Has many frameworks such as Scrum, Lean, etc. |
| Team Size | It has a large team size as it involves all the stakeholders | Less team members. As smaller is the team, transition will be faster |
| 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 |
| Automation | Automation is what DevOps are known for. Their focus is to automate tasks for maintaining efficiency | Agile is not necessarily dependent on Automation |
| Emphasis | Aims to automate the whole process and maintain the morale of employees | Aims to deliver the product on time, using all available feedback |
| Quality Focus | Early detection through feedback | Automation and continuous monitoring |
| Evaluation | Evaluated by employees themselves | Evaluated by customers or clients |
| Shift Principle | Primarily, “Shift Left” | “Shift Left” and “Shift Right” |
| 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 |
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We have made a table, which includes the top tools for DevOps and Agile:
What is a Common Misconception about DevOps and Agile?
DevOps aims to automate and simplify infrastructure provisioning and application deployments. Agile is more concerned with project management frameworks like sprints and scrums. In reality, DevOps complements and supports Agile goals by enabling fast, reliable software releases. It’s important not to confuse the two, an organization can follow Agile practices without fully accepting DevOps principles, and vice versa.
Know how the Questions are asked in Interviews. Read from the DevOps Interview Questions and Answers blog.
Conclusion
While DevOps and Agile have different focuses, they share the common goal of accelerating software delivery through collaboration, automation, and incremental improvements. Agile provides the framework for iterative development, prioritizing frequent delivery of working features. DevOps then complements this by simplifying infrastructure provisioning and application deployments, enabling code to move rapidly from development into production environments.
The interactions between the two approaches help break down barriers between teams and roles. When implemented together effectively, DevOps and Agile allow organizations to respond quickly to changing market needs, delivering high-quality, valuable software to users at a faster pace.
Now that we have gone through the differences between DevOps and Agile, it is clear that the decision to adopt either of them completely depends on our necessity. We can either go for how DevOps and Agile interrelate or we can use both the tools individually. This way, we can make the best of all and bring out quality products.