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Though agile and DevOps are widely popular methodologies, they鈥檙e frequently misunderstood. Both are designed to help you achieve faster and more streamlined releases and better collaboration between teams, so you may think agile and DevOps are synonyms, or even competing philosophies. However, comparing agile vs DevOps is akin to comparing apples vs oranges鈥攊t鈥檚 both inaccurate and unnecessary because they鈥檙e completely different concepts.
Let鈥檚 examine some common misconceptions about the differences between agile vs DevOps.
Though agile and DevOps are both meant to help you streamline the development and release process, they鈥檙e not synonymous. Agile is a process that development teams follow, whereas DevOps is a philosophy that requires a total culture change for your organization.
Agile breaks software development projects into a series of small, well-defined, and repeatable processes. Every aspect of development, testing, and deployment is performed in short sprints, so you can quickly identify and fix issues and easily pivot in response to changing requirements.
DevOps, on the other hand, is a philosophy that promotes collaboration between development and operations teams. DevOps prescribes a number of tools and processes鈥攊ncluding automation, programmable infrastructure deployment, and iterative software development鈥攖hat are meant to help companies move closer to a truly seamless combination of development and operations.
As you can see from their definitions, agile and DevOps are not the same thing. However, the two often complement each other, and many DevOps organizations use agile to achieve their iterative software development goals.
It鈥檚 tempting to believe that you can purchase an off-the-shelf solution that will implement agile and/or DevOps for you, but that isn鈥檛 the case. While there are tools and frameworks that can help you achieve your agile and DevOps goals, both of these principles require a broader culture change that you can鈥檛 just buy and install.
Agile requires you to rethink and restructure your entire software development process. Every stakeholder鈥攆rom executives to developers to QA testers鈥攏eeds to commit to following the agile development cycle throughout each iteration of every project. Implementing agile requires training, strategizing, and frequent and open communication. You can certainly purchase technology solutions and tools to help you achieve agile, but they won鈥檛 do you any good unless your company culture shifts to prioritize agile principles.
Similarly, DevOps is a holistic methodology that requires a full-company shift in how you think about development and IT operations. Before you can implement any automation or infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools, you need to get your entire organization on board with the DevOps philosophy. If you try to roll out DevOps tools and practices before your people are ready, you鈥檙e likely to receive enormous pushback from staff who don鈥檛 understand why they need to change their workflows. You need everyone in your organization to understand the importance and benefits of collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery so everyone can work together to achieve your DevOps goals.
One of the key principles of DevOps is faster software delivery, which you may also associate with agile. Indeed, many teams use an agile software development methodology to achieve continuous integration/continuous deployment and other DevOps goals. However, agile isn鈥檛 required for DevOps, and there are other approaches you can use depending on your business requirements, team size, and other factors.
Agile and DevOps are not mutually exclusive鈥攕aying that DevOps replaces agile would be like saying ice cream replaces apple pie. You can have each one independently, but they work even better together. You may find it easier to start with an agile implementation, and then gradually adopt more and more DevOps principles and practices when your organization is ready. Or, you may focus on other areas of DevOps first, and then implement agile as a step in your DevOps maturity roadmap.
Though they have some overlapping principles and benefits, it鈥檚 unfair to compare agile vs DevOps as if they are competing methodologies. In fact, agile and DevOps complement each other beautifully when used together.
Clearing up these misconceptions about agile vs DevOps should show you that it鈥檚 unnecessary to pit one against the other. You can choose to implement agile instead of DevOps (or vice versa), but they鈥檙e commonly used together as they both support similar goals and processes.
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