It’s all in the name. Or is it Really? – DevOps or Agile?

Biase De Gregorio, IQ Business

For the past 6 years, I have kept a close eye on emerging trends in the Agile industry. It seems like agilists (and consulting houses) are always searching for the “next big thing”! Disciplined Agile Delivery, SAFe, DevOps…  

Is DevOps the next big thing? Or is DevOps actually Agile 2.0? In fact, is DevOps even that different to Agile?

I am concerned with the “label” that Agile has inherited in recent days. If I look back at what the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto wanted to achieve in 2001, I think we have lost our way.

Agile has grown in popularity over the last few years, even though it has been around for several decades. The growth has been driven primarily by IT fuelled by the rapid changes and growth in technology. Traditional software delivery approaches were challenged. After all, how can you create predictability in software development, when you have 3 different types of variability:

1. Technology: Namely, the rapid change in technology (i.e. Moore’s law [https://www.mooreslaw.org/]) and the drastically reducing cost of IT
2. Requirements: The constant change of requirements in a dynamic market, enhanced by a general lack of understanding of the client’s actual needs
3. People: People are not predictable. We are impacted by so many internal and external events that it becomes impossible to work at the same level of productivity on a daily basis.

Agile frameworks attempted to solve these challenges through an iterative and incremental approach, using self-organized teams with a high focus on visibility, transparency and client value, and the use of empirical data to help manage stakeholder expectations.

Enter the DevOps movement (Not sure what DevOps is? Check out The (Short) History of DevOps by Damon Edwards - https://youtu.be/o7-IuYS0iSE).

DevOps was pioneered by an Agile practitioner, Patrick Debois, who was struggling between managing new product development and fighting fires in operations. He created an opportunity for people to get together to discuss these challenges and solve problems through #DevOpsDays. And so the DevOps movement was born!

The video mentions that it is always important to understand the history behind things and to determine the “why”. I couldn’t agree more! DevOps, much like the initial days of Agile, was a movement by practitioners for practitioners. It is not “owned” by anyone and is not a product or framework you can buy. Unfortunately, much like Agile, DevOps is growing into another “silver bullet”. Individuals and organisations are trying to ride the crest of the wave by capitalizing on the money it can make.

Unfortunately, I think we have missed the fundamental principle of what we are trying to achieve. Both Agile and DevOps are attempting to support the opening statement created by 17 Software practitioners in 2001: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”

Included in the manifesto is the principle of "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility". Being agile is the ability to adapt to change. If we are introducing new practices, tools and techniques to achieve technical excellence and good design, awesome! The primary difference between Agile and DevOps is extending the ownership of the self-organized team, beyond development to operations. Basically, getting closer to owning the end-to-end value stream.

Whether you call it Agile, DevOps or whether you trying to implement frameworks such as Scrum, SAFe, DaD, we are all actually trying to achieve the same objective. We are just trying to find new and better ways of doing cool stuff.

 So, does it really matter what you call it?