11 Aug Does DevOps Replace Agile?
Kirby Wadsworth
Kirby has more than two decades of marketing leadership in both publicly traded large enterprises and emerging startups. As a founder and early venture executive with several successful exits, Kirby helped pioneer the cloud storage, continuous data protection, and file virtualization industries.
DevOps and Agile are the two most common frameworks to execute software development. According to Gartner, 70% of IT teams use DevOps. Agile may have come to fruition first, but DevOps is taking control of the spotlight. So is DevOps replacing Agile altogether? Or is there a way these two frameworks can work in unison to ensure seamless deployment and time to market? Let’s begin by discovering the main difference between DevOps and Agile.
Agile focuses on software development, ensuring the development team and its own processes have the agility to make quick changes. Whereas DevOps prizes end-to-end business solutions, enabling collaboration between the development and operations teams to increase the speed of work in both stages. Both approaches speed up the deployment pipeline, but in different ways. So this begs the question, which is better?
The Nuances Between DevOps and Agile Methodologies
Besides Agile being utilized mostly for the development team and DevOps collaborating with development and operations teams, there are many other differences between the two approaches. Let’s take a look at a few.
Agile: The purpose of Agile is to manage complex projects.
DevOps: The purpose of DevOps is to manage end-to-end processes.
Agile: The Agile approach focuses on constant changes.
DevOps: DevOps focuses on consistent testing and delivery.
Agile: Agile development is measured in sprints.
DevOps: DevOps requires deadlines and benchmarks for major releases daily and sometimes every few hours.
Agile: Automation is not a main goal.
DevOps: Automation is a primary goal.
Agile: Sacrifices security for speed.
DevOps: Places importance on both speed and security.
Essentially, Agile easily adapts to allow for changes to be made in a timely manner throughout the life of the product. DevOps and help from automation tools create better quality products by removing bugs earlier in the pipeline and following coding best practices. Both DevOps and Agile have their strengths and weaknesses, but DevOps clearly has a few advantages over Agile. Let’s take a look at these advantages in closer detail.
What Makes DevOps Better Than Agile?
Primarily, DevOps places an emphasis on the readiness of the organization and its operations. For instance, DevOps culture is all about collaboration between departments and breaking down silos to work together to accomplish a unified goal. The benefit here is that collaboration enables faster deployments and improved product quality.
On the contrary, Agile focuses on the functional and non-functional readiness of the product. While this enables quick product changes, Agile doesn’t offer end-to-end business solutions like DevOps. Because employees work in silos, any cross-team communication is constrained. This causes inefficiencies throughout the pipeline as multiple teams working on the same project have little insight into the different stages of the pipeline.
Ultimately, DevOps makes more of an impact on the pipeline than Agile by:
- Ensuring faster deployment and continuous delivery
- Offering significant improvement in product quality
- Automating repetitive tasks leaves more room for innovation
- Aligning development and operations teams
DevOps & Automation Tools
For maximum agility and flexibility, enterprises are utilizing DevOps in conjunction with cloud services, containers, and microservices. This combination enables DevOps teams to safely move faster without putting the data at risk or sacrificing quality.
Tools like the ionir Data Services Platform for Kubernetes eliminate the need for time-consuming manual input, helping IT professionals increase the speed of deployment releases while improving collaboration among cross-functional teams. The container-native ionir platform, built on microservices, enables developers to move any volume of data in 40 seconds or less, eliminating 99% of wasted wait time.
To determine if your team is prepared to implement automation tools to accelerate your DevOps pipeline, check out our readiness checklist.
Does DevOps Replace Agile?
Finally! The question we’ve all been waiting for: does DevOps really replace Agile? The short answer is no, not really. Think about it this way, DevOps exists because of Agile. Basically, Agile walked so DevOps can run. When Agile was first developed it was a revolutionary method for developers. However, as time went on, new challenges like the lack of communication between development and operations teams required a new method. Thus, DevOps was created as a descendent of Agile, not necessarily a replacement.
Furthermore, there is no rule stating you can’t use DevOps and Agile at the same time. In fact, using both methodologies will only speed up delivery of and increase the quality of deployments. Agile enables developers to make rapid product changes to meet customer demands, bridging the gap between the customer and the development team. Whereas, DevOps eliminates the gap between developers and operations professionals. By using both DevOps and Agile, organizations can meet their customers’ needs at a faster and more secure rate.
Final Thoughts
So we’ve come to the conclusion that DevOps doesn’t have to replace Agile — it improves upon it. Now what? It’s time to take your IT team to the next level, whether that be with just DevOps or with DevOps and Agile methodologies. Then, consider which technologies will support your team, speed up the deployment pipeline, and drive new efficiencies throughout the organization. Once you’ve got that covered, you’re on your way to going to market quicker than ever before.
Interested to learn more about what efficiencies ionir can bring out in your DevOps team? Start your free trial today!
