Agile Vs. DevOps: The Difference, and Why it Matters

Processes boost productivity. We’ve all known this, experienced this. For the software industry, this comes across a lot more true, especially, when we turn to the revolution brought by processes and methodologies like Agile and DevOps.

As customer experience takes the center stage, it matters so much more for businesses to deliver flawless, faster and continuous experiences. Given that, businesses must adopt to the latest, robust, and proven methodologies of software development and delivery. However, for leveraging these “popular and effective” processes effectively, it becomes imperative to first ensure a fundamental understanding on these, and further a key unique factors where one process stands better than the other.

Understanding the difference between Agile and DevOps

There can be never-ending debate if you get down to comparing the two processes. However, for a general understanding, the following details may help you get started.

Further, in this blog, we will explore about why testing is important in effective implementation of both the processes.

DevOps & it impact on your development process?

DevOps is an approach intended to bring together software developers with information technology personnel to expedite, automate, and repeat software deployment. It lets a developer’s team design, develop, test, deploy, and operate software as a whole – from conception to deployment. Amazon, Walmart, Netflix, Adobe, and Sony Pictures are just a few of the giants that use DevOps methodologies to automate all of their processes.

DevOps is being implemented into the lifecycle of even small startups such as Ola, Groffers, or Flipkart to improve their products. DevOps increases product quality and reduces costs once it is implemented within an organization.

“DevOps is said to have boosted innovation in the work of 43% of 700 IT professionals surveyed.”

Agile has a major role to play in leading companies.

In the software development process, Agile emphasizes the constant iteration of testing and development. Additionally, the system has been designed to be collaborative and facilitate rapid software development. Delivering high-quality products is a result of Agile methodologies. This also helps developers commit their efforts towards the right objectives for the project, as they are encouraged to adopt the right approach.

Many very large companies, such as British Telecom, CISCO, and LEGO, have experienced large increases in profits and efficiency since adopting Agile methodologies.

But testing is a key part of the pipeline to ensure speed and quality since both are integral to business growth. Integrating it with other tools such as project management, issue tracking, and automation is essential for doing this effectively.

CONTINUOUS TESTING – streamlining your entire software delivery lifecycle

1. Continuous testing has the primary goal of assessing business risks
2. The release is protected by a safety net to ensure the customer experience is excellent
3. For every run of the test, the test environment must be stable and the test data must be valid
4. Testing in production and Application Performance Management (APM) all tie together to provide the best of both worlds.
5. Continual Testing provides actionable responses to all pipeline stages.
6. In all associated technologies, it consists of tests that evaluate the end user’s experience from end-to-end
7. To eliminate redundancy and optimize the coverage of business risks, the test suite is continuously reviewed and improved

Benefits of Continuous Testing

Now that test automation is mainstream, a lot of businesses are taking continuous testing to the next level. Businesses can automate the delivery pipeline and release software with confidence when software is validated in real-time at different quality gates.

Here are some of the benefits:

• Business stakeholders receive immediate feedback to make informed decisions
• Objectivity in assessing the goals of the organization – useful for critical decisions such as whether to proceed or not
• Fully automating Continuous Delivery reduces business risks
• Elimination of defects as early as possible reduces overall defect costs
• By providing service virtualization access to all test environments

Final Thoughts

By taking these insights into account, it’s clear that both Agile and DevOps aim to add value to the end-user more efficiently, but they each work from different angles. Continuous integration and continuous delivery are achieved through DevOps. While Agile focuses on improving the development processes, DevOps involves the operations team.