Agile & DevOps, are Ally or Foe?

No longer, DevOps is an unknown term. Software development companies and business are grasping DevOps which is incredible, even organizations following Agile methodologies are moving ahead to embrace DevOps. Nonetheless, the digits of adoption are progressing but are causing a great number of disarray too. 

Knowing just basics about Agile and DevOps would give a quick thought that both are unique terminologies and while deep diving into each of them the outcomes will be “Agile is about procedures like Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Lean while CI and CD along with automated infrastructure are incorporated in the DevOps methodology”. 

With just an overview over mind, let's attempt to comprehend what precisely DevOps and Agile are, also on whether they are supporters or rivals?

About Agile & DevOps

Agile is a disciplined iterative project management process which favors continual analysis and advancement, an initiative viewpoint that nurtures cooperation, self-association and responsibility, a software development and delivery, and a business approach to meet client's objectives and requirements.

An organization can't do Agile, but it can be Agile. Organization can perform Agile processes like Scrum, XP, TDD, BDD, etc. Agility is about to accept the change and to triumph in an invariably changing environment. Even, DevOps is one of the key fixings to add agility in an organization.

DevOps widens the philosophy of Agile, still it depicts that cross-functional team and operation team should perform tasks concurrently. Infrastructure as Code, Monitoring Schemes, Configuration Management, a set of tool chain, Virtualization and Cloud computing are the essence blocks of DevOps.

Automation, Containerization and Continuous Testing - significant privileges of DevOps lead it to be the biggest winner of this year with good acceptance ratio for software development.

Avoiding the unnecessary confusions and overlooking the self-supposition, have a look at some of the practical connections (developers can easily connect to each phase) between them.

Realistic Kinships 

Agile is more than Scrum and Sprint, while DevOps also exceeds constant integration and delivery concept. Agile methodology purely focuses on productivity and reliability, whereas DevOps is concern about the quick work and delivery with high quality. (Mentioned below is not the difference, rather it is the response of each methodology in particular phase.)

Debate still doesn't end up here. Question somewhere still arise.

Is DevOps subset of Agile?

DevOps isn't a distinct approach, nor a subset, but can be said as a slender expansion of Agile to incorporate operations, team-up as ONE team, achieve the target to conveyance solution completely to the client. DevOps just ruptured the barriers of an Agile team and included automation and continuous processes in the existing procedure of Agile and encouraged the organization agility.

Just like, Waterfall was extended or upgraded to V-Model and iterative model which was further supplanted by Agile and was adopted widely for software development. But, now DevOps is going to be the prominent prospect, justify the continuous improvement in SDLC, justifying that it is merely an extension to the Agile features. All that is required is to grasp, comprehend and instil it.

DevOps and Agile are independent of each other but each of them is an enabler for the other.

In a nutshell, in each Agile Sprint, DevOps concept like CI, CD can be executed, even in multiple Sprints. Coding and Architectural best practices of Agile and DevOps must be followed by developers to enhance quality, make deployment speedier and keep away from risk factors. Always core focus needs to be on Organizational Agility.