Agile vs DevOps?

(Introduction for the following is at DevOps explained with my Dosa story , if you have not already seen.)

As soon as I got to know DevOps in detail, that it is a automated mechanism which involves disparate teams, processes and tools to hasten the product/feature delivery, the immediate question I got is "Then what Agile for?. Is Agile Versus DevOps, or Agile and DevOps independent of each other or Agile and DevOps together to get achieve something ?".

Unless the core concepts of Agile methodologies and DevOps are blended to derive a meaningful inter-relation above question remain unanswered, while we still know what they are meant for. At a high level, both look totally independent with distinct differentiators in place and serving different purposes. But they aren't at a core level!!! . How?

Primarily, I will briefly state key aspects of both these popular trends, in order to show what they are for and then blend them together to derive the meaningful relation. Lets start!!.

Agile- 

• It is a Process practice that helps with incremental, organized , asynchronous and collaborative efforted product delivery (through frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, XP etc).
• Helps with planning and management of team's efforts on latest features/products in a very efficient, dynamic, and strict time boxed manner, that gives freedom for quick adjustments and changes which are inevitable and costly, if not accommodated for. This makes Agile more preferred than traditional software development practices
• One of the very crucial aspect is, Agile STRICTLY aligns development efforts(IT) with Organization's business objectives and priorities through periodic interactions and planning. Such focused and collaborative efforts from Business and IT teams helps achieve incremental business value.
• Also, such collaboration between Development and Business teams creates a platform for implementing Design Thinking and Behavior Drive Development practices
• All that said, Agile is not just about tight time boxed efforts, sprinting and demoes, it has greater cause embedded within.

DevOps- 

• It is a Technology practice
• Meant for Faster and Quality product delivery
• Focuses on incremental and quick product delivery, while ensuring quality.
• Crucial factor is it Integrates application developers' efforts and artifacts in real-time with Application deployment operations , Infrastructure , Quality, Product support/monitoring teams, and Application security to deliver a best quality product/features quickly to derive business value with enhanced features and operational efficiency.
• Faster times to market are achieved together with the support from various tools, meant for varied purposes (SCM, CI, CD, Quality, Vulnerability Detection and Remediation using application security testing, BDD).
• All that said, DevOps is not just CI/CD but a larger stack involved

Seeing all above, it appears that they are meant for different purposes, and are dealt as separate frameworks and executed in a different manner, but their end goal is same. Agile is for planning & management of incremental efforts and DevOps is to support that thorough planning with its own mechanisms for quicker product delivery, ultimately to achieve the Business Value.

In other words, Agile and DevOps are inseparable processes and complement each other with their own strengths and capabilities, to support the two critical aspects of IT, i.e Project Management and Product Delivery. Thereby, both contribute in different ways to achieve the common goal of deriving Business Value, Incrementally and Quickly, and while adhering to all compliance and quality standards. Hence, rather than Agile Vs Devops, it is Agile + DevOps to make the business value accelerators complete.

Trivia: Career insights for the individuals, switching from traditional SDLC practices to Agile and/or DevOps world.

Agile: Roles such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, Agile Coach are best fitting roles for the individuals acting as project Co-Ordinator, managers in traditional SDLC world.

DevOps: Devops Engineer is the suitable role for individuals involved with traditional application deployment operations , Infrastructure provisioning and configuration management, application support.