DevOps vs Agile: How Agile & DevOps Interrelated

Agile was the dominant focus, but DevOps is now gaining ground. It is a myth that Agile and DevOps cannot work together. Both methodologies can work together to create a vibrant market for software products. These discrepancies and downtime will not affect software products if Agile & DevOps work together.

The central question is, “How do Agile and DevOps interact?” Let’s first define what these terms mean.

What is Agile?

Agile refers to the continuous iteration of software development and pilot testing throughout the Software Development Life Cycle process (SDLC). Agile software development emphasises incremental, iterative, and evolutionary growth. The Agile method breaks down the product into smaller parts and integrates them for final testing.

Agile also helps teams offer value to clients without difficulty. The process encourages a continual evaluation of needs, plans, and results and helps them be more efficient. This allows the team to respond to any changes quickly. Agile also increases the team’s ability to respond and design for change. Agile is a method of managing and succeeding under uncertain circumstances. Agile software development encompasses pair programming, sprints, stand-ups, test-driven developments, and planning sessions.

Read more: Agile Planning: A Beginner’s Guide To Planning Projects

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a combination of operations (Ops), development (Devs), and collaboration for software development that achieves outstanding efficiency. This culture encourages cooperation between the development and operations teams.

DevOps refers to software development emphasising collaboration, integration and communication between IT personnel to speed up product deployment. This ensures customer satisfaction and makes your products more successful on the market. DevOps is a process that delivers updates, fixes, or new features while ensuring that the product aligns with the business goals.

How Agile and DevOps Interrelated

The comparison of DevOps with Agile is incorrect. Agile differs from DevOps because it is a strategy focused on iterative development with autonomous and cross-functional teams. DevOps is a practice that shifts operations job roles into development, laying the groundwork for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

Agile & DevOps are not in competition. Both are complementary in developing software releases with higher quality and faster speeds. Agile & DevOps is most useful when managing large-scale enterprise projects. Tech and dev teams must compete effectively in areas where software is the primary difference.

DevOps is closely linked to Agile. Agile is responsible for software development, and DevOps focuses on making the code production ready and improving the process. Although the approaches are different, they are both interrelated and essential characteristics of the software development cycle.

Agile provides the foundation for DevOps, encouraging teams to create products more quickly. Launching new products can be made consistent when both teams work together. Agile and DevOps do not have to be the same, and they only share a common goal: creating bug-free software that works flawlessly.

Agile is all about people being connected to resources and processes while still adhering to the Agile manifesto. DevOps ensures that new ideas are quickly passed to the operation or business unit.

The client also controls the negotiation process. Agile & DevOps work together to stabilise the framework. Agile and DevOps can work together in the software development life cycle to achieve a shorter cycle and more flexibility with resources and transparency from both internal and external feedback.

DevOps focuses on the software requirements while Agile teams focus on the development. DevOps creates a product that Agile teams can test and then deploy.

Read more: DevOps vs SRE – What’s the difference?

Synergy with Agile & DevOps

Software Life Cycle Process Step:	Agile Value:	DevOps Value Add	Synergy: Agile & DevOps Together
Plan, Code, Build	Scrum team discipline. Customer stories drive work. Small projects. Team free to explore and fail fast.	Organization-wide engagement. External feedback loops. Automation. Fluid job roles. Microservices.	Transparency. Shorter build cycle. Internal & external feedback. Operational awareness. Resource flexibility.
Test, QA, Security	Specialized job roles. Skills certification. Confidence in testing. Set standards and governance.	Automate repetitive work. Build security literacy. Measure compliance against standards.	More testing across platforms. Security is a team responsibility. Share ownership.
Infrastructure orchestration	Provision risk-free development environments for learning and experimentation.	Containers. Infrastructure as Code. Remote source code repositories. Protect Data pipelines	Lean infrastructure, scalable and secure. Rapid provisioning. Developer engagement.
Continuous integration continuous delivery (CICD)	Small chunks of code that can be integrated into full programs. Separates dev and deployment decisions.	Automate process for integrating code into releases that are deployed based on business need.	Shorter development / delivery software life cycle. Reliability and sustainability. Safe and secure app pipeline.
Monitoring and Feedback	Daily stand up. Sprint ceremonies. Backlog management. Retrospectives. New customer stories.	Automate monitoring that identifies failures before impacting customers. Assure compliance.	Optimize the flow of information to prevent failures from impacting customer experience.
IT management	Process approached to managing work, skills development, team contribution and software pipelines.	Tools and automation approach to remove operations bottlenecks. Operational accountability in dev.	Focus on team goals and objectives. Upskilling. IT modernization. Greater collaboration.

Agile & DevOps work together to help teams meet their service level agreements, forecast outcomes better, and address backlog issues. These claims are backed by metrics, automated testing, QA and monitoring, and feedback.

Agile & DevOps training helps teams collaborate more effectively. Cross-functional job positions encourage more regular contact and fewer handoffs when things might get lost. Good communications practices spill over to dependable customer follow-up. Other indicators are that Agile and DevOps can increase team value or capability.

1. Failing quickly takes less time and does not waste resources.
2. Iterative development allows for the creation of new ideas.
3. Machine learning-assisted automation lowers coding faults.
4. A change in direction is a normal part of software development.
5. Continuous release of new versions is a business goal, not merely an IT ambition.

DevOps does not have a coordination function. And it is a style, a mindset, and a process. Teams can’t work together when they don’t completely understand all the dependencies. Working in silos is not a way to achieve DevOps.

DevOps is not a top-down, structured approach. Developers work in self-organising agile groups to build, adapt to feedback, and get customer input. The agile philosophy of putting customers first is the foundation of any fully developed DevOps team. They will have to discard it later before they can write code.

Read more: Top 10 Essential Skills for DevOps Engineer

Conclusion

DevOps and Agile are ideas used in different areas of the Software Development Life Cycle. DevOps can be described as a technical extension of Agile’s ideas. Both principles favour rapid iterations and quick reactions to changing conditions.

These are similar ideas, but they target different phases of the SDLC. Agile development and DevOps deployment are the hallmarks of highly successful teams. Agile is a framework for creating products, and DevOps is an assortment of technical methods for running production. These two ideas are equally effective and can be combined in your SDLC.