Agile Or DevOps? What Is Your Calling For Custom Software Development?

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!

The Super-Fast Agile

Agile custom software development is a new-age software methodology enforcing iterations between the constantly changing requirements and the evolving development with the close collaboration of cross-functional teams. There is continuous feedback after an iteration that enables continuous refinement of the system.

The agile methodology advocates a well-controlled project management process that involves frequent meetings on a daily basis to discuss the roadblocks and to get general updates on the projects. This encourages the team members to adapt to accountability, self-discipline, and teamwork for quick delivery of good quality software and follow practices and standards that align with the customer requirements and the company goals.

Advantages Of Agile

• Responsive To Change

One of the biggest advantages of Agile development is responsive to change and working on tasks that matter. A well-aligned agile project has a list of tasks to be completed in a project along with their priority. They continue to take up tasks in each iteration according to the priority. They also receive feedback of the previous iteration and work accordingly thus being responsive to change.

• Accepting Uncertainty

Agile practices understand the fact that we may discover more information as we proceed or may find that a particular solution does not fit the customer need or an entirely different problem may be uncovered.

The Agile principles allow the acceptance of the unknown and prioritization supports discovery and experimentation to take care of the uncertainties in custom software services.

• Quick Feedback

For the projects to operate with uncertainty and changing requirements, there is a need for quick iteration and feedback on the tasks completed to make sure that the current efforts are aligned with the customer needs.

• Flexibility

The ability to deliver software in an iterative manner provides the business more flexibility in terms of when a product or a particular feature is delivered to the user.

• Less Documentation Upfront

Agile practices focus more on defining and prioritizing problems in close collaboration with the developers, designers and clients. High upfront effort in designing, documentation and contracts is against the agile manifesto.

Words of Caution

• Lack of knowledge

Like any other changes, if undertaken 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 that ask for a significant culture shift in the organization. For example, the stakeholders need to be available for a review session, the sales and marketing team need to open about the possibility of changing requirements, the management needs to understand that the requirement is implemented priority-driven rather than opinion-driven. 

• Integration of Skillsets

Changing to agile practices requires more focused and strong inter-communication amongst interdisciplinary teams. Regular interaction of the testing team, design team, and development team at regular intervals working together as an integral team is quite pre-requisite for delivering a quality product.

• Scalability

Agile methodologies were developed for small organizations to grow and adapt to larger organizations where there are 500 or more developers. The real challenge is how to build the interrelationship among the smaller teams while still maintaining a cohesive approach in the flexible agile environment.

The Very Collaborative DevOps

DevOps is a practice that inculcates better communication between development and operations as major portion of operations becomes automated and programmable. In the organization level, DevOps is a part of the IT team that creates and maintains the infrastructure managing the shared IT services.

Advantages Of DevOps

There are several benefits that are thereby adopting DevOps for custom software development.

• It helps to reduce the time for the product to go from the design stage to the production.
• Building products quickly means developers get faster feedback from users.
• The automation and tools result in efficiency improvements.
• Continuous delivery improves the productivity as the developers and testers need not spend time in setting up their environments and need not manage other complexities.
• Improved productivity and quality of the product ultimately results in improved customer satisfaction.

Words Of Caution

One of the major areas of concern in adopting DevOps is quality assurance. As the QA team is unaware of the tools and practices used by DevOps for speeding up the development process and the developers choose speed many a times over security, issues like necessary scans and code checks may be skipped out.

Agile vs DevOps: Some Interesting Points

• Agile teams depend on automated builds, continuous integration, and continuous delivery.
• DevOps teams use tools with various metrics, configuration management, monitoring schemes, virtualization, and cloud computing.
• Agile practices might sometimes lead to delayed deliverables, incompatible components resulting from the disparate scrums or teams and new features breaking the old ones. One of the important reasons for these problems is the lack of adequate communication and consistency.
• This is where DevOps can help to bring in consistency, faster delivery, and smooth coordination with both themselves and the developers, operation teams & various other departmental teams.
• Agile involves cross-functional teams like a designer, tester, and developer.
• DevOps takes this ahead by adding an operations person for the transition from development to deployment.
• DevOps brings in the automation of processes and thus transparency amongst the teams.
• Agile encourages how we think about development, instead of making larger changes it advocates smaller but manageable changes that eventually leads to a bigger change.
• DevOps can help bring in this cultural change within the organization, through communication and maintaining stability with flexibility.

DevOps vs Agile The Key Differences

Though Agile and DevOps help make the development to deployment process more efficient, it is important to know where the differences are.

• Speed

Agile requires the frequent deployment of code whereas DevOps is more concerned with the appropriate deployment of the code.

• Specialization

Agile teams generally include self-driven members who can do the job of other members of the team when required, to prevent any kind of slowdown. DevOps in contrary supports separate teams for development and operations of custom software solutions and the members are bounded within their teams but are updated with frequent communication.

• Documentation and communication

The agile approach follows daily informal meetings discussing the projects daily updates and goals which means it isn’t very document-intensive. The DevOps, on the other hand, don’t have a frequent meeting but have extensive meeting that needs to be documented in order to communicate effectively their understanding and the plan of execution. DevOps require the design documents and requirement document in order to fully understand a software release.

• Team Size

Small teams is one of the foundations of Agile practices which enable faster move and accept flexibility. DevOps on the other hand, have multiple teams that work together each team practicing different processes.

• Scheduling

Agile teams have shorter sprints which rarely lasts for more than a month. But DevOps value reliability and hence focus on long-term planning.

• Automation

DevOps extensively depends on automation to maximize efficiency. Agile practices, on the other hand, do not require automation much of automation as there are small sprints that can be managed without automation.

Agile vs DevOps: In a Nutshell

Thus, despite several differences, whether to use both these theories is a decision an organization has to take judiciously, though experts believe amalgamation of the two helps in more rational decision-making and improvising the custom software services manifolds.