Agile to DevOps: Game of Succession or Compliment Each Other?

It is believed that top business organisations run on SAP but another facet to reckon is that the real ambition they all chase is enhanced user experience. This can be observed in the enterprising giants like Walmart, Facebook and Sony Pictures constantly work on improvised ways to enhance software development life-cycle (SDLC) for an enhanced user experience. Agile and DevOps are two of the highly surging contemporary SDLC methodologies to have kept technology business arena running successfully. In the age of dynamic digital commotion, both Agile and DevOps streamline development processes while providing chaos-free and seamless methodology. True to its name- Agile’s working paradigm is to bring agility to the development process, whereas DevOps= Development + Operations infuses agility in the operations as well as development mechanism.

However, lately, there has been a rise in speculation questing if DevOps is a replacement to Agile? Well No! For all practical reasons, Agile is a better alternative to the redundant Waterfall methodology, when in fact, DevOps is a direct successor to Agile. Continuous enhancements in the technologies and complex client demands have increased such challenges that are difficult to combat sometimes even with Agile and this is where DevOps made its debut.       

Methodology Evolution: Agile evolved into DevOps

In the initial phase, becoming a successor to an already established methodology  wasn’t the actual idea behind DevOps. But, in the past few years, DevOps has gained major attention in the manufacturing industry. Agile was introduced in the year 2001 to unveil competent approaches to software development. However, not long after, software engineers felt the need to an approach which promotes feedback oriented system, hence, DevOps. The technique symbiotically merges development with the environment in which the process takes place. It has revolutionised the whole work culture by boosting automation for code development, constant review integration, and easy version control. Meanwhile, today companies enjoy a true cross-functional self-organizing team that works on a simple, chaos-free and smooth communication paradigm.

Small IT startups were the first to adopt agile but slowly as the methodology matured, bigger companies also started picking up with the process which developed into a valuable and widely accepted SDLC trend which obviously, became an integral part of the IT ecosystem. The practice updated and automated the entire software delivery life-cycle. The dawn of Continuous Integration (CI) resulted in a vital need of developers in each phase which was gratified by the DevOps initiatives.

The Advent of Continuous Delivery (CD)

Principal analyst at Forrester Research Kurt Bittner once said that, "If agile was the opening act, continuous delivery is the headliner." DevOps and CD are touted as the the successors to Agile which have provided startups as well as large enterprises like Fortune 1000 companies to widen their enterprise value. To fill in even the slightest of loopholes, companies are merging both technical and processes framework to combat complex and critical organisational requirements. CD is a procedure that encompasses lucrative potentials of Agile by blending the key features and tools of CI and DevOps. Briefing from a technical standpoint, continuous delivery is a software engineering and development approach that effectively shortens development cycle which makes the product flexible enough to be released anytime. The process demands regular straightforward and iterative deployment process.

The introduction of DevOps comes as no surprise as IT has always witnessed unprecedented inventions and upgrades in the existing technologies to resolve the complexities and critical problems. The problems like miscommunication between operational and development teams have said to depletion with DevOps. On a concluding note, according to John Allspaw, DevOps is about, "Ops who think like devs. Devs who think like ops." In other words, DevOps is a lot more than just automating the entire software development pipeline; it is a holistic yet dynamic approach to adapt changes in IT operations altogether. It is safe to say that DevOps compliments Agile than being a successor to the latter.