Although Agile, CI/CD, and DevOps have their own strengths, they all support each other. Agile focuses on the process of development, CI/CD focuses on practices and DevOps focuses on culture.

They are different development tools for building your practice

A single tool is not enough to build a house. You can’t enable your development practice to be successful with just one tool. DevOps and Agile are distinct tools that each have their own importance. The results of a transformational development organization using all three tools for their intended purposes are transformative.

Related post – Why Infrastructure as code is essential for DevOps practice

Agile development

Agile is now called agility by some manifesto authors. It focuses on eliminating process barriers and enabling key stakeholders (people like customers and developers) to work more closely together to accelerate delivery. Agile emphasizes the constancy and flexibility of software production and recognizes that we often don’t know all we need to create, develop and deliver high-quality software within monolithic lifecycles.

Although agile has taken on many different meanings over the last two decades, the core principles of agile remain: To remove process barriers that empower individuals, to produce software quickly, to collaborate closely with customers, and to respond to (rather than resist) change.

Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)

Code integration is the next automatic phase after the continuous development phase and one of the entire DevOps life cycle’s cores. In continuous integration, add-on functionalities are built-in with new codes and integrated into the existing code. Bug detection is one of the activities in this phase. The planning of test execution happens at the testing phase, tallying the customer requirements to incorporate the features mentioned in the project requirements. Unit testing, code review, compilation, integration testing, and packaging happen in this phase.

As a result, the source code gets modified multiple times at this phase, which may occur weekly or daily. The seamless transitions occur, and updated packaged code is transitioned into the next phase, which could be the testing server or production server.

Continuous Deployment

This is the most active phase in the DevOps lifecycle. This is mostly applicable when the application goes live. 

In this phase, the final application code is deployed to the production servers. The critical process in this phase is Configuration Management, which is carried out preciously to deploy application code on all servers. Developers establish an application’s performance and consistency gradually and curate. They release the code to the servers, schedule the updates for all servers, whereas these configurations are kept consistent throughout the production process. Containerization tools help in continuous deployment through the Configuration Management process. 

DevOps culture

What is DevOps? The term itself defines how it works.

DevOps = Development + Operations

While the Agile process significantly reduces software development’s turnaround time compared to the waterfall model, none of the two models assures quick and continuous delivery of error-free software. There comes the DevOps model.

The ways DevOps help in reducing the software delivery timeline – 

• Reduce the time involved in SDLC
• Secure continuous production
• Deliver high-quality, full-proof software.
• Stable operating environment 
• Steadfast collaboration
• Ongoing innovation 
• Time optimization, especially in maintain phases

DevOps – This process combines the development and operation processes to make the process as a whole a seamless operation. 

5 DevOps pillars

• Reduce organizational silos
• Accept failure as normal
• Implement gradual changes
• Leverage tooling and automation
• Measure everything

When one talks about DevOps, the possibility is unlimited. In fact, it is one of the broadest terms used in the field of software development. Still, if one has to define DevOps, they might define it as the combination of performing 5 different activities.

1. Continuous integration
2. Cloud infrastructure
3. Continuous deployment
4. Test automation
5. Configuration management

What does CI/CD mean in DevOps and how can it be used? How are they related to Agile development?

What is the relationship between agile, CI/CD, and DevOps in real-life development? Because CI is a common tool for engineering teams, they often begin with it. DevOps can help organizations understand the configuration, packaging, and orchestration that are required to software-define more of the lifecycle. This will create a more valuable CD practice. DevOps can help agile development by incorporating CI/CD.

Continuous Integration, CI is the process in which both development and testing teams come together for validation of a new code. The most common way of doing this is for the developers to write the code and integrate the same for testing once every month. The major issue with this process was that the code that was being tested was a month old and it probably became more troublesome for the developers to resolve the errors being detected while testing. The good news is that the problem was resolved by taking CI on automation. This way the developers could keep testing the code while developing it continuously.

Coming to Continuous Deployment, CD. This is the process in which companies tend to release the code to the user continuously. The frequency varies from multiple times a day to once a month. This has been made possible because of the cloud environments. For this, the servers are deployed in a way that the production becomes continuous, without having to manually update them.

So, in short, CI/CD is the process that involves continuous development, testing, and delivery of the new codes. Now, nothing in this world is perfect. This process also has certain pitfalls that one should be aware of and avoid to increase the pace as they have done at Facebook and Netflix.

If in doubt

Here’s an easy and quick way to distinguish agile, DevOps, and CI/CD.

• Agile is focused on processes that highlight change and accelerate delivery.
• CI/CD is focused on software-defined lives cycles, highlighting tools that emphasize automation.
• DevOps is focused on culture and focuses on roles that emphasize responsiveness.