How Agile and DevOps are related?

Often I am asked: Are Agile and DevOps are the same? If we do the Agile transformation, do we need to do DevOps transformation separately? Can we do Agile transformation and DevOps transformation in parallel? What is common in Agile and DevOps? What is not so common in Agile and DevOps?

Answers to all of these questions can be obtained at two layers – Philosophical and Reality of daily life by answering one question – What is the relationship between Agile and DevOps?

Agile and DevOps both are the mindset, a style of working, treating your environment in an emphatic manner. Agile brings dev teams business together to serve the customer on a continuous basis. DevOps integrates dev and ops teams to release features on a continuous basis and monitor the solution continuously to ensure its availability with an appropriate level of performance.

Now it’s time to land in the real world. Agile aligns dev and business organizational structure to streamline the working rules between them to create business value with higher efficiency and productivity at a sustainable pace. Agile helps in managing changing priorities. DevOps aligns dev and ops organizational structure to fasten the feature release into production with predefined quality and enhances operational efficiency. Agile as well as DevOps promote contemporary engineering practices to increase flow, shift left, and continuous fight with entropy and drift to promote continuous improvement. Both Agile and DevOps are in favor of sustainable pace and resilient systems.

For embracing Agile, an organization needs both Agile and DevOps. There should not be two different initiatives to embrace Agile and DevOps. There should be one initiative – embrace Agile & DevOps.