What differentiates DevOps and agile development? Do they overlap, cooperate, or compete with one another? We consulted the specialists.
Two software development approaches, Agile and DevOps, share the goal of releasing the finished product as rapidly and effectively as feasible. Even while many businesses are keen to use these techniques, there is frequently some misunderstanding between the two. What is covered by each methodology? Where do they cross over? Should you select one over the other or can they coexist?
As usual, we’ve drawn on the expertise of sector experts to describe and distinguish the two techniques, list their benefits and drawbacks, and emphasize the most appropriate applications for each.
Dev Ops.
Software development teams and IT professionals are intended to work collaboratively as a result of the DevOps technique. It is a notion that encourages a culture of cooperation between these two teams, who formerly operated in separate silos from the start of the design process all the way to product release.
Software development (Dev) and operations (Ops) are combined in the process known as “DevOps” (Ops). According to Tyler Duzan, Product Manager of Raleigh, North Carolina-based Percona, “the goal is to facilitate communication between the teams so they can create, test, and deliver software more rapidly and with more efficiency and speed.”
It supported continuous integration, continuous deployment, automated testing, and transparency in code repositories by integrating these two separate teams and processes. In Dallas-based Qentelli’s CTO and co-Founder Prasanna Singaraju’s words, “Dev” and “Ops” can “successfully provide top-quality products and services on an ongoing basis” when they collaborate.
What is Agile?
The agile methodology, which first appeared around 2001 with the publication of the agile manifesto, is also a way of software development. It makes use of twelve principles and four ideals to create an “agile” software development culture. Agile, in general, fosters adoption and a leadership attitude that values responsibility, cooperation, and self-organization. Even when such requirements and trends alter late in the development process, the agile approach focuses more on consistently aligning development with consumer wants and trends.
In an interview with Simon and Smith, Mike Hendrickson, Vice President of Technology & Developer Products at Nashua, New Hampshire-based Skillsoft, said that agile is a set of principles that facilitate collaboration across individuals, teams, and bigger organizational units. Hendrickson further emphasized that the “agile mentality” places more emphasis on people than it does on procedures and equipment. “An agile organization learns to adapt to ongoing change, which enables them to spot new opportunities and increase customer value. Being “agile” is essential for success since all areas of the business are collaborating to provide more value to their consumers in an era of rapid disruption, according to Hendrickson.
Agile vs DevOps: The Benefits, Similarities, and Differences
Fundamentally, Agile focuses on allowing smaller teams to cooperate with one another so it can respond rapidly to the constantly changing demands of consumers, whereas DevOps brings together two huge walled teams to enable speedier software releases.
Agile and DevOps are managed in a similar way, according to Davy Hua, Head of DevOps at Shiftleft in Santa Clara, California. Agile uses sprints, which may last anywhere from a week to months, to control the development calendar, whereas DevOps focuses on hyper-releases, which can happen several times per day, according to Hua.
Agile and DevOps may cooperate because their strengths compliment one another. Agile offers the capacity to quickly adapt to changing needs and greater communication between several smaller teams, whereas DevOps supports a completely automated continuous integration and deployment pipeline to enable frequent releases.
The “mutual advantages” of DevOps and Agile were further explained by Michael Mazyar, CTO of Samanage, a company situated in Cary, North Carolina. “Agile and DevOps, when used together, may help firms build and deploy technology much more quickly. Additionally, there is a focus on “placing the demands of the customer at the forefront of whatever technology you are producing, [together with] an awareness of how the software is being used, and [how it might be improved].”