What are the Differences Between DevOps and Agile? (Infographic)

People are often confused by DevOps and Agile in the software development industry.

You may have a lot of questions such as:

• How are DevOps and Agile methodologies different?
• Is one more secure?
• Which one should I use?  (Just one or both)?

This infographic will break it down and simplify it for you.

Let’s start by understanding each one separately.

What is Agile?

This methodology takes an iterative and incremental approach to development.

1. Involves producing release cycles on a continuous basis.
2. Breaks the software down into small functional deliverables for customer approval
3. Addresses the gaps in communication between customer and developer.
4. Small and rapid releases, customer feedback, and collaboration are the focus of this model.
5. Aims to bring agility to development.

What is DevOps?

This approach to operations focuses on communication, collaboration,  integration, and deployment.

1. Promotes collaboration between operations and development to deploy releases to various environments.
2. Automation, continuous feedback, discipline, and process development are the highlights of this model.
3. Development teams make small but frequent updates to the production software which are often automatically deployed to environments
4. Aims to bring agility to operations and deployments.

Top Differences between DevOps and Agile

Features	DevOps	Agile
Purpose	Managing end-to-end engineering processes	Managing software development projects
Processes/Practices	Processes like Continuous Deployment (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), etc.	Practices like Agile Kanban, Agile Scrum, etc.
Key Focus Area	Equal priority on timeliness and quality	Main priority on timeliness and integration with stakeholders
Goal	To address the gap between operations and development and testing teams	To address the gap between development and testing teams and customer needs
Task	Focuses on constant testing and delivery	Focuses on continuous manageable product improvements
Implementation	A core focus on collaboration with no commonly-accepted framework	Range of tactical frameworks including Sprint, Scrum, and Safe
Release Cycles/ Duration	Smaller release or continuous-release cycles with immediate feedback; deadlines and benchmarks built around major releases	Development is carried out in units of “sprints”; each sprint usually lasts about two weeks could take a month or less
Scope of Work	Agility and the need for automation around deployment processes	Agility around the development and feature delivery processes
Feedback	Comes from internal team using monitoring tools	Comes from customer
Cross-Functionality	Development and operations work together; not separately	Any team member is free to take up any required task within the project
Automation	Primary goal in DevOps as it helps maximize efficiency	No emphasis on automation
Advantage	Allows rapid and automated deployment of new features, minimizes risk of deployment issues	Capability to accommodate changes during the development phase as features are prioritized
Challenge	Difficulty integrating build and deployment processes	Difficulty estimating effort and requirements in the early stage of development

Which is Better?

The simple answer is neither. Each of these methodologies fills a different purpose and they are often used together.

Agile allows development teams deliver functionality more frequently.

DevOps allows more efficient build and deployment of delivered functionality to environments like QA, Pre-Prod, and Production.

In either case, secure coding and security testing are not implicitly part of the model.

This can cause a huge disconnect between developers and management in terms of application security.

Since security should be a major concern, it’s crucial that you use secure SDLC solutions in both development and deployment models to ensure your deployed applications are secure.

These solutions should:

• Easily integrate into your existing process.
• Reduce the overhead on your security team.
• Support early integration to minimize redevelopment costs.