DEVOPS OR AGILE?
Do you know the difference between DevOps and Agile ? They were formed as standalone concepts. But now the two terms are getting fused.
In this post we will examine the crucial differences between agile and DevOps and find out why the two are connected so tightly?. I think a good place to start is understanding a little more about a common angle I have seen in learning about Devops and agile.
Let's start with definitions.
Agile Development
Agile is an approach that focuses on delivering small results faster rather than releasing one big interaction of the product . The software is developed in iterations as the team releases a new version every week or month (etc) with non-incremental updates .The final goal of agile is to deliver an optimal experience to the end-users
DevOps
DevOps usually describes software development and delivery practices based on cooperation between software developers and operations specialists ,the main DevOps benefits are delivering a simplified development process and minimiziation of miscommunication between both teams.
What is the difference between Agile and DevOps
The difference is mainly the preocuppations. Agile and devops have different preocuppations but they are helping each other. Agile wants short iteration, which is only possible with the automation that Devops brings. Agile want customer to try a specific version and quickly give feedback which is only possible if devops make creation of new environment easy.
Different participants
Agile focuses on optimiszing communication between end-users and developers while DevOps targets developers and operation team members. We could say that agile is outward-oriented towards customers whereas DevOps is a set of internal practices and processes.
Team
Agile usually applies to software developers and project managers. The competencies of DevOps engineers lie in the intersection of development, QA and operations they are involved in all stages of the product cycle and they are part of the Agile team.
Applied Frameworks
Agile has a lot of management frameworks to achieve flexibility and transparency. Scrum > Kanban > Lean > Extreme > Crystal > Dynamic > Feature-Driven >. DevOps focuses on the development approach in collaboration but doesn't offer specific methodologies. However devops promote practices like Infrastructure as Code, Architecture as Code, Monitoring, Self Healing, end to end test automation ... But per say this is not framework, rather practices.
Feedback
In Agile the main source of feedback is the end user in DevOps the feedback from stakeholders and the team itself has a higher priority.
Target areas
Agile focuses on software development more than on deployment and maintenance. DevOps focuses on software development as well but its values and tools also cover deployment and post-release stages like monitoring, high availibility, security and data protection.
Documentation
Agile prioritises flexibility and tasks at hand over documentation and monitor. DevOps on the other hand regards project documentation as one of the essential project components.
Risks
Agile risks derive from the flexibility of the methodology. Agile projects are difficult to predict or evaluate as priorities and requirements are continually changing.
DevOps risks derive from a misunderstanding of the term and the lack of suitable tools, processes and skills. Some people see DevOps as a collection of software for the deployment and continuous integration failing to change the underlying structure of the development process
TOOLS
Agile tools are focused on managing communication and collaboration, metrics and feedback processing. The most popular agile tools include JIRA, Trello, Slack, zoom SurveyMonkey and others.
DevOps uses tools for team communication, software development, CI/CD like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, BitBucket Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS,Azure cloud etc , even though agile and DevOps have slightly different focus and scopes the key values are almost identical therefore you can combine the two.
Bring it all together
The combination of Agile and DevOps brings the following benefits you get
Flexible management and powerful technology
- Agile practices help DevOps teams to communicate their priorities more efficiently
- The automation cost that you have to pay for your devops practices are justified by your agile requirement of deploying quickly and frequently
- It leads to strengthening the team adopting agile practices will improve collaboration increase the team's motivation and decrease employee turnover rates
- As a result, you get better product quality
Devops allows coming back to previous product development stages to fix errors and prevent the accumulation of technical debt. To adopt Agile and DevOps simultaneously follows these 7 steps :
- Unite the development and operation teams.
- Create build and run teams, all development and operational concerns are discussed by the entire DevOps team.
- Change your approach to sprints, assign priority ratings to offer devops tasks that has the same value than development task. Encourage development and operations teams to exchange their opinion on other teams workflow and possible issues.
- Include QA in all development stages.
- Choose the right tools.
- Automate everything you can.
- Measure and control by using tangible numeric deliverables.
What do you think? Do you have different views? I want to hear from Developers, Operations, QA anyone that has a better understanding of Agile and DevOps please comment on this!