Software development process employs different methodologies depending on the nature of projects. Moreover, there are old as well as modern software development methodologies that are common across the industry. Depending on the SDLC and business requirements, developer apply these methodologies to complete projects on time, within budget and with the required quality standard. The common methodologies include waterfall, spiral, prototype, RAD, JAD, XP, build and fix, cleanroom, agile, DevOps, to name a few. All methodologies have their own area of application/specialization and it is often unnecessary to compare each and identify the better methodology.
Let us briefly discuss two prominent methodologies that have gain widespread acceptance and adoption in the industry (Agile and DevOps).
DevOps: DevOps methodology aspires to combine “Development” and “Operation” phases of the traditional software methodologies. Moreover, it brings people from the development and operations together to work on the same project. The purpose of this unification is to increase productivity, improve collaboration and deliver quality products
Agile: Agile is a framework that focuses on continuous and fast delivery of manageable increments of a project through iterative development and testing processes. Unlike the traditional methodologies, agile embraces changes and flexibly incorporates new requirements easily at any phase of the development.
The key differences of DevOps and agile methodologies include the following:
- DevOps focuses on uniting “Development” and “Operation” teams, while agile focuses on enabling cooperation of cross-functional teams and delivering constant iterative releases
- DevOps focuses on an end-to-end engineering processes that embrace continuous development and testing, while agile embraces project requirement changes anywhere in the development process
- DevOps focuses on introducing continuous and daily delivery, while agile advocates for making incremental deployments after each sprint (15 days)
- Team members in DevOps have diversified skillsets (Developers, Operators), while team members in agile methodology have similar skillsets (Developers)