Agile Vs. DevOps: What’s the difference?

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a software development method which focuses on communication, integration, and collaboration among IT professionals to enables rapid deployment of products.

DevOps is a culture that promotes collaboration between Development and Operations Team. This allows deploying code to production faster and in an automated way. It helps to increases an organization's speed to deliver application and services. It can be defined as an alignment of development and IT operation.

What is Agile?

Agile Methodology involves continuous iteration of development and testing in the SDLC process. This software development method emphasizes on iterative, incremental, and evolutionary development.

Agile development process breaks the product into smaller pieces and integrates them for final testing. It can be implemented in many ways, including scrum, kanban, scrum, XP, etc.

Agile Vs. DevOps

Stakeholders and communication chain in a typical IT process.

Agile addresses gaps in Customer and Developer communications

DevOps addresses gaps in Developer and IT Operations communications

KEY DIFFERENCE

• DevOps is a practice of bringing development and operations teams together whereas Agile is an iterative approach that focuses on collaboration, customer feedback and small rapid releases.
• DevOps focuses on constant testing and delivery while the Agile process focuses on constant changes.
• DevOps requires relatively a large team while Agile requires a small team.
• DevOps leverages both shifts left and right principles, on the other hand, Agile leverage shift-left principle.
• The target area of Agile is Software development whereas the Target area of DevOps is to give end-to-end business solutions and fast delivery.
• DevOps focuses more on operational and business readiness whereas Agile focuses on functional and non-function readiness.

Difference Between Agile and DevOps

Parameter	Agile	DevOps
What is it?	Agile refers to an iterative approach which focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases.	DevOps is considered a practice of bringing development and operations teams together.
Purpose	Agile helps to manage complex projects.	DevOps central concept is to manage end-to-end engineering processes.
Task	Agile process focusses on constant changes.	DevOps focuses on constant testing and delivery.
Implementation	Agile method can be implemented within a range of tactical frameworks like a sprint, safe and scrum.	The primary goal of DevOps is to focus on collaboration, so it doesn't have any commonly accepted framework.
Team skill set	Agile development emphasizes training all team members to have a wide variety of similar and equal skills.	DevOps divides and spreads the skill set between the development and operation teams.
Team size	Small Team is at the core of Agile. As smaller is the team, the fewer people on it, the faster they can move.	Relatively larger team size as it involves all the stack holders.
Duration	Agile development is managed in units of 'sprints.' This time is much less than a month for each sprint.	DevOps strives for deadlines and benchmarks with major releases. The ideal goal is to deliver code to production DAILY or every few hours.
Feedback	Feedback is given by the customer.	Feedback comes from the internal team.
Target Areas	Software Development	End-to-end business solution and fast delivery.
Shift-Left Principles	Leverage shift-left	Leverage both shifts left and right.
Emphasis	Agile emphasizes on software development methodology for developing software. When the software is developed and released, the agile team will not care what happens to it.	DevOps is all about taking software which is ready for release and deploying it in a reliable and secure manner.
Cross-functional	Any team member should be able to do what's required for the progress of the project. Also, when each team member can perform every job, it increases understanding and bonding between them.	In DevOps, development teams and operational teams are separate. So, communication is quite complex.
Communication	Scrum is most common methods of implementing Agile software development. Daily scrum meeting is carried out.	DevOps communications involve specs and design documents. It's essential for the operational team to fully understand the software release and its hardware/network implications for adequately running the deployment process.
Documentation	Agile method is to give priority to the working system over complete documentation. It is ideal when you're flexible and responsive. However, it can hurt when you're trying to turn things over to another team for deployment.	In the DevOps, process documentation is foremost because it will send the software to the operational team for deployment. Automation minimizes the impact of insufficient documentation. However, in the development of complex software, it's difficult to transfer all the knowledge required.
Automation	Agile doesn't emphasize on automation. Though it helps.	Automation is the primary goal of DevOps. It works on the principle to maximize efficiency when deploying software.
Goal	It addresses the gap between customer need and development & testing teams.	It addresses the gap between development testing and Ops.
Focus	It focuses on functional and non-function readiness.	It focuses more on operational and business readiness.
Importance	Developing software is inherent to Agile.	Developing, testing and implementation all are equally important.
Speed vs. Risk	Teams using Agile support rapid change, and a robust application structure.	In the DevOps method, the teams must make sure that the changes which are made to the architecture never develop a risk to the entire project.
Quality	Agile produces better applications suites with the desired requirements. It can easily adapt according to the changes made on time, during the project life.	DevOps, along with automation and early bug removal, contributes to creating better quality. Developers need to follow Coding and Architectural best practices to maintain quality standards.
Tools used	JIRA, Bugzilla, Kanboard are some popular Agile tools.	Puppet, Chef, TeamCity OpenStack, AWS are popular DevOps tools.
Challenges	The agile method needs teams to be more productive which is difficult to match every time.	DevOps process needs to development, testing and production environments to streamline work.
Advantage	Agile offers shorter development cycle and improved defect detection.	DevOps supports Agile's release cycle.