Comparison between DevOps, Agile, and Scrum Methodologies
DevOps, Agile, and Scrum are three different methodologies that structure the process of software development.
DevOps is a software development methodology that puts together an enterprise’s development and operations teams. It combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools with the purpose of increasing an organization’s ability to deliver functional applications and services at high velocity.
The Agile methodology is a way to manage a project by breaking it up into several phases. It requires constant collaboration with stakeholders and continuous improvement at every stage. The teams will go through a process of planning, executing, and evaluating once the work starts. This iterative approach to software development and project management will have teams deliver work in small, but consumable, increments. Agile is a combination of methodologies, not a single approach to development. It is an aggregation of Scrum, eXtreme Programming (XP), and other systems of practice that developers used before. The result of this unification was the Agile Manifesto, which consists of 12 principles, based on four core values: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools; Working software over comprehensive documents; Customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and Responding to change over following a plan.
Scrum is an Agile framework used in the development of Software based on iterative, incremental delivery, team collaboration, and flexibility throughout the project. Scrum is a fast, adaptable, effective, and flexible methodology whose main purpose is to deliver value to the customer during the development process. Also, it allows teams to work together by providing a structure efficiently and effectively, as well as providing adaptability and flexibility as the project evolves.
Scope and Roles:
The scope of DevOps embraces deployment and system integration as well as automation of many processes throughout the whole lifecycle. This lifecycle will take the software through the different stages of DevOps: planning, coding, building, testing, release, deployment, operate, and monitoring. The cross-functionality of the development, testing, and operations teams in these stages is clear. This is one of the reasons this methodology successfully ensures its purpose.
Agile works great for scope planning in software projects since it establishes high-level requirements first and finer details later. Its processes focus on simplicity and building out smaller chunks of features and functionality. Some of the common roles in Agile include Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team member. The development cycle could be 2 weeks to 2 months with the goal of delivering a working code that showcases a specific set of features. Another part of the agile process is change management since the scope is revised and a new user story is added to the sprint. Then the product owner decides the new user story’s priority and value and adds them to the product backlog. Like most projects, the schedule and resources are planned beforehand but a high-priority feature doesn’t necessarily cause budget or schedule changes. This iterative planning development allows for changes with each new sprint. By allowing the more important features to get built first, the customer’s key requirements get built first and the lower-value features get postponed or cut.
Scrum focuses on delivering results by working through a series of sprints. The number of sprints needed and their length for a specific project are decided during the planning face. The Scrum process is formed by product backlogs (a prioritized list of features and requirements for the product being developed), sprints (a time-boxed period), sprint backlog (a list of items from the product backlog), sprint planning (a meeting at the beginning of each sprint), daily scrum (a daily meeting with the team), sprint review (a meeting at the end of each sprint to review the work completed during the sprint and gather feedback from stakeholders), sprint retrospective (A meeting at the end of each sprint to reflect on the previous sprint and identify opportunities for improvement). All these different steps of the process guarantee the delivery of a potentially great product incrementally at the end of each sprint. Also, it improves the performance of the team over time and increments the value of the developing product.
In order to successfully go through the whole process Scrum has three main roles. The Product Owner is responsible for setting the priorities and goals for the project. The Development Team is responsible for delivering the work. The Scrum Master is responsible for facilitating the process.
Tools and Artifacts:
DevOps Engineers have access to a huge range of technical solutions and can leverage the capabilities of tools like virtualization and containerization; continuous integration servers; and cloud platforms. Because of the many stages that form its lifecycle, DevOps has a long list of tools that can be used for the implementation during the different stages, some examples are Notion for planning; Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and IntelliJ for coding; Gradle for building; JUnit 5 for testing; Jenkins for release; CloudFormation and Kubernetes are used for deployment; and Cloudwatch is used for monitoring. In addition, the most popular cloud platforms using DevOps are AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
There are many tools that can be used in Agile including retrospective meeting tools, task boards, and burn-down charts. In addition, Agile uses digital tools such as Trello, Jira, and Asana to manage workflow and tasks. These tools are used to create specific artifacts such as user stories and acceptance criteria to help with the requirement gathering.
Since there are many steps in the process, each of them has a particular tool to use. Some of the tools that can be used are: Product Backlog Management tools (Trello, Jira, and Pivotal Tracker), Sprint Planning tools (Targetprocess, Asana, and Targetprocess), Task Management tools (Asana, Trello, and Targetprocess), Time tracking tools (Toggl, Harvest, and Clockify), Collaboration tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom), Retrospective tools (Retrium, Sprint Retrospectives, and Fun Retro), and Reporting and Analytics tools (Pivot, Scrumwise).
Benefits:
Using DevOps, Enterprises can enjoy many benefits like greater scalability and availability; faster issue resolution; reduction in complexity; faster and better quality product/service delivery; spending more time on innovation; more automation; and less resource idle time. Because of its awesome benefits, CapitalOne and Netflix are companies that have embraced the DevOps methodology.
Agile has several benefits, such as better collaboration and communication, the ability to adapt to change, and increased transparency and predictability. Additionally, Agile allows teams to deliver working software at regular intervals, increasing customer satisfaction and providing a competitive advantage. Moreover, Agile encourages continuous improvement and learning and promotes self-organizing teams.
By using Scrum, companies can enjoy many benefits like a higher quality of the software delivered since it includes continuous testing to ensure the functionality of the software. It also guarantees faster delivery by offering iterative and incremental approaches allowing teams to deliver working software more frequently. In addition, it improved collaboration by utilizing cross-functional teams and regular meetings to promote collaboration and communication between the team and the enterprise.
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