What’s the Difference Between Agile and DevOps?

DevOps and agile practices are complementary approaches in the software delivery lifecycle. They meet customer needs differently by focusing on distinct principles and practices.

Purpose

The agile methodology focuses on incremental software development. It encourages teams to collaborate with customers, deliver value, and respond quickly to change. Teams use agile practices to efficiently respond to evolving customer needs and market demands in software development.

DevOps includes operations teams in the agile software development culture. The role of operations is to deploy and deliver the software to end users. If software changes frequently, the operations team also has to keep up. They have to manage software environment configuration changes, which becomes increasingly challenging as the application scales.

DevOps breaks down silos and focuses on collaboration between the development and operations team. Various tools and technologies increase flexibility and efficiency in deploying software.

Principles

These are the four main principles, or priorities, of agile methodology:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Reactive change over rigidly following a plan

Agile teams embrace change and provide incremental and iterative development throughout a project lifecycle. They involve customers early on and throughout the process, which helps ensure that teams adjust to client requests.

In contrast, DevOps has five main principles, summarized by the acronym CALMS:

• Collaboration between development and operations teams for shared responsibility
• Automation tools and techniques to automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and increase efficiency
• Lean strategy to eliminate any processes that increase time to delivery
• Measurement of performance by collecting and analyzing data
• Sharing information and learnings across teams to improve overall performance and innovation

Practices

The agile methodology splits tasks into smaller units called stories. An agile team will work in short iteration periods called sprints. Each sprint creates a new, shippable increment of the software or product. Team members participate in daily stand-up meetings to coordinate. Similarly, the agile approach uses a range of regular retrospectives to improve and find efficiencies.

DevOps automates the process of building, testing, and deploying as much as possible. This supports the frequent release of new software versions. Continuous integration merges code into a shared repository, which helps ensure developers regularly test code. Continuous delivery uses deployment pipelines to deploy to several environments at once. 

DevOps also uses infrastructure as code (IaC), so teams can handle management and provisioning as software development tasks. By monitoring infrastructure and applications, developers find potential issues and troubleshoot for improvement.

Skills

Agile team members need to be adaptable, flexible, and good communicators. Most team members also have cross-functional skills and can work across several domains to complete a product. Communication is vital, as agile teams must give and respond to feedback effectively.

DevOps teams need skills like security awareness, monitoring, automation knowledge, and operations skills. DevOps team members write IaC scripts and develop tools that monitor the delivery pipeline. Maintaining automated workflows is vital for DevOps. 

DevOps teams need a more technical understanding of software deployment automation. Agile teams include non-technical members like business analysts and project managers.

	Agile Practices	DevOps
Purpose	The agile process uses an iterative approach that quickly and effectively evolves to respond to customer needs.	DevOps practices unite the development and operations teams, using automation for continuous deployment.
Principles	The agile mindset has four core principles: people, customer collaboration, working software, and reactive development.	DevOps has five principles: culture, automation, lean principles, measuring, and sharing.
Practices	Agile development breaks tasks into stories and communicates daily in stand-up meetings. A team will work for short periods called "sprints" to manage complex projects and improve efficiencies.	The DevOps software development method emphasizes continuous delivery, automation, monitoring, and continuous integration.
Team skills	Agile team members are flexible, adaptable, multi-functional, and strong communicators. They may be technical and non-technical.	DevOps team members automate processes with IaC, deploy software, and are generally technical.