Agile vs DevOps? DevOps vs Agile? What are they? How do they work? How they differ and what similarities do they have? It is true, that both of these terms are so often used that managers and specialists often consider them interchangeable (which is obviously not true). So let’s look at each of these methods separately in order to answer all questions, that are stated below.
The two most discussed terminologies of the millennial project execution methodologies for customized software drive every animated conversation today. The transition from traditional methods like Waterfall, to Agile to DevOps in itself is fascinating!
Agile custom software development is a new age software methodology enforcing iterations between the constantly changing requirements and the evolving development with close collaboration of cross-functional teams. There is a continuous feedback after iteration that enables continuous refinement of the system.
The agile methodology advocates a well-controlled project management process that involves frequent meeting on daily basis to discuss the road-blocks and to get general updates on the projects. This encourages the team members to adapt to accountability, self-discipline and team work for quick delivery of good quality software and follow practices and standards that aligns with the customer requirements and the company goals.
Advantages of Agile
Transparency
An Agile approach provides a unique opportunity for clients to be involved throughout the project, from prioritizing features to iteration planning and review sessions to frequent software builds containing new features. However, this also requires clients to understand that they are seeing a work in progress in exchange for this added benefit of transparency.
Higher customer satisfaction
The product owner is always involved, the progress of development has high visibility and flexibility to change is highly important. This implies engagement and customer satisfaction.
– Demonstrating working functionalities to customers in every sprint review.
– Delivering products to market quicker and more often with every release. The clients get early access to the product during the life cycle.
– Keeping customers involved and engaged throughout projects.
Realistic Customer Expectations
Most customers have little or no understanding of what it takes to develop software. This can result in many problems and arguments on projects as the customer makes demands that they imagine would be easy for the development team, and question where the time and effort is going and why the project is taking so long.
Disadvantages
Lack of knowledge
Like any other changes, if undertook without investing sufficient time in having a thorough understanding of the process as to why the changes are made and how it will impact the project, fruitful results will not be achieved.
Culture Fit
Agile practices require flexibility, availability, quick paced with quality, frequent reviews which asks for significant culture shift in the organization. For example the stakeholders need to available for review session, the sales and marketing team need to open about the possibility of changing requirements, the management needs to understand that the requirement are implemented priority driven rather than opinion driven.
Integration of Skill sets
Changing to agile practices requires more focused and strong inter-communication amongst interdisciplinary teams. Regular interaction of testing team, design team and development team at regular interval working together as an integral team is quite pre-requisite for delivering quality product.
Scalability
Though agile methodologies were developed for small organizations to grow and adapt but for larger organization where there 500 and more developers. The real challenge is how to build the interrelationship among the smaller teams while still maintaining the cohesive approach in the flexible agile environment.
Disadvantages
– In case of some software deliverables, especially the large ones, it is difficult to assess the effort required at the beginning of the software development life cycle.
– Documentation tends to get sidetracked, which makes it harder for new members to get up to speed
– When developers run out of work, they can’t work on a different project because they’ll be needed soon
– Agile can lose sight of what it is trying to achieve. You can become locked into the process of improvement for improvement’s sake, sometimes something is just fine and does not need to be tweaked or improved.
– Agile Methodologies require that the client company use Agile terminology such as “scrum,” “sprints” and “points,” etc. This is often confusing and not perceived as necessary.
DevOps and Agile Quite Similar
The continuous development goals of Agile development extend into the continuous integration and release with DevOps. Agile brings a product from users to development, while DevOps brings a product from development to operations, or release. With help from Agile, DevOps is able to produce faster delivery and expedited results.
Some Extra Points –
– Devops is an evolution of Agile
– Devops is the missing link between agile development and operations
– Devops is a subset of Agile
– Agile is a subset of Devops
– What time are we having lunch?
They Are Different Too!
Agile is a software development methodology, which means that after software is created and released, the development team engage in another project. DevOps, on the contrary aims to take a ready-made software, and deploy it in a safe and reliable manner. At the same time, DevOps does not depend on software developed using the Agile technique. Therefore, when using DevOps it is quite possible to apply the waterfall development model.
With the Agile method, teams tend to be broken down into smaller teams of just a few people. This allows singular facets of a project to get completed quickly before they are combined. DevOps, on the other hand, bring teams together, forming larger groups that work to achieve the same goals. Within that team there may be groupings, but everyone works together.
Agile teams don’t codify their meeting minutes or other communications – often preferring lo-fi methods of simple pen and paper. DevOps, on the other hand, requires design documents and specs in order to fully understand a software release.
Agile teams don’t codify their meeting minutes or other communications – often preferring lo-fi methods of simple pen and paper. DevOps, on the other hand, requires design documents and specs in order to fully understand a software release.
This is the heart of DevOps, as their overall goal is to minimize disruptions and maximize efficiency, especially when deploying software. Agile doesn’t require automation.
