Chapter 9. Does the Rise of DevOps Undermine Agile?

The question may come to you; can agile survive as DevOps becomes more ubiquitous? agile methods in software development have been practiced over the last two decades. The last 4-5 years have, in addition, seen the rise of DevOps methods. There have been questions on whether DevOps replaces agile. Agile is a philosophy that found acceptance as being against the waterfall model, as organizations increasingly struggled to match the right level of quality versus speed. While agile is often a way of thinking prevalent in anything that a company does with speed, here we limit ourselves to the uses of agile in IT.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Agile, DevOps, and the respective drivers for the use of each
• Agile is about speed and DevOps removes boundaries between development, QA, and operations
• Compare and contrast agile and DevOps

We will conclude the debate with the fact that agile and DevOps complement each other and are not substitutes.