Table of contents
- What is Agile?
- What is DevOps?
- Agile vs DevOps: Key differences
- Comparison table: Agile vs DevOps
- Are Agile and DevOps the same?
- Is Agile or DevOps better?
- Using Agile and DevOps together
- Tooling and automation (code reviews with Graphite)
- Conclusion
Agile and DevOps are two leading approaches in modern software development. Both aim to deliver software faster and more reliably, but they do so in different ways. This article provides a comprehensive Agile vs DevOps comparison – defining each methodology, examining their differences and overlaps, and exploring whether they are best used as complementary practices or in competition. We'll also look at relevant examples, use cases, tooling (including how Graphite can assist with code reviews), and answer common questions like "are Agile and DevOps the same?" or "is Agile or DevOps better?".
What is Agile?
Agile is a philosophy and framework for software development that emphasizes iterative progress, flexibility, and customer collaboration. Agile traces back to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001), which laid out core values like prioritizing "individuals and interactions over processes and tools" and "responding to change over following a plan". In practice, Agile teams break work into small increments (often time-boxed as sprints in Scrum or a continuous flow in Kanban) and deliver working software frequently. This iterative approach allows for adapting to feedback and changing requirements rapidly, ensuring the product continuously meets user needs. Agile is not a single methodology but an umbrella term for many frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, XP, etc.) that share these principles. The focus is on how to develop and deliver software: short development cycles, frequent releases, and close collaboration with stakeholders.
Example: A team using Agile (Scrum) might plan 2-week sprints to develop features, hold daily stand-up meetings, and deliver a potentially shippable product increment at the end of each sprint. Customer feedback is then incorporated into the next iteration.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that integrates software development (Dev) with IT operations (Ops). The goal of DevOps is to streamline the entire software delivery pipeline – from code commit to deployment and maintenance – enabling high velocity and continuous delivery of value to users. According to Amazon Web Services, "DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity… faster than with traditional software development and infrastructure management processes". In essence, DevOps breaks down the silos between developers, testers, and operations teams by promoting collaboration, automation, and shared responsibility for delivering running software. Key DevOps practices include continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery/deployment (CD), infrastructure as code, automated testing, monitoring, and frequent incremental releases to production.
Under a DevOps model, a single cross-functional team often owns a product from development through production support. This approach aligns everyone towards the common objective of reliable, frequent releases. DevOps also emphasizes measuring performance (using metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, mean time to recovery, etc.) to continually improve. It's not a framework like Scrum, but rather a culture and toolchain that can work in conjunction with Agile. As Red Hat describes: "DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations to deliver software more quickly, reliably, and stably, focusing on culture, automation, platform design, and constant feedback loops".
Example: A company practicing DevOps might have developers, QA, and ops engineers working together on one product team. Code is continuously integrated and automatically tested; if tests pass, it's deployed to production immediately (possibly many times a day). Tech giants like Amazon and Netflix employ DevOps practices to achieve hundreds or thousands of deployments per day.
Agile vs DevOps: Key differences
Agile and DevOps are often discussed together, but they are not the same. Agile is about process and people in software development, whereas DevOps is about process and tools across software delivery and operations. Below are some key difference areas in an agile DevOps comparison:
Scope and focus: Agile primarily focuses on the software development process – organizing how work is planned and executed in iterations to deliver frequent software increments. DevOps has a broader scope, covering the end-to-end software delivery pipeline (development and operations), with an emphasis on continuous integration, delivery, and deployment. Agile addresses how to develop effectively; DevOps addresses how to release and maintain software efficiently.
Team structure: Agile teams are typically small, cross-functional, and self-organizing. They include roles like developers, a scrum master, and product owner, and mainly concern the development side. In contrast, DevOps teams tend to encompass a wider range of roles – development, QA, IT operations, and sometimes security – all working closely together. DevOps blurs the boundaries between departments, often merging dev and ops into one team responsible for the entire lifecycle (as captured by the "you build it, you run it" ethos). Agile teams might hand off to ops after development, whereas DevOps teams own the product from development through operations.
Methodology vs culture: Agile is a methodology (or philosophy) with specific frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, etc.) guiding how to plan work in iterations, manage changing requirements, and regularly meet (daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, etc.). DevOps is more of a culture and philosophy that doesn't prescribe a strict process like Scrum. Instead, DevOps involves adopting practices and automation tools (CI/CD, configuration management, monitoring) that encourage collaboration across traditionally separate teams. In short, Agile provides process frameworks for development, while DevOps provides cultural principles and technical practices for seamless delivery.
Release frequency: In Agile, the team might release at the end of each sprint (e.g. every 2 weeks) or whenever a feature is ready, focusing on incremental development. DevOps aims for continuous delivery – code changes are deployed to production as they are ready (often multiple times a day) without waiting for a sprint boundary. This continuous deployment is enabled by heavy automation. Agile's cadence is iterative (but may still be constrained by sprint schedules), whereas DevOps is continuous flow. This highlights Agile's iterative development vs. DevOps' continuous deployment as a fundamental difference.
Feedback sources: Both approaches value feedback but from different sources. Agile thrives on customer or stakeholder feedback at the end of each iteration to steer the product in the right direction. DevOps emphasizes feedback from the system and operations – e.g. monitoring user behavior in production, infrastructure metrics, and continuous testing results – to quickly fix issues and optimize performance. In Agile, a successful sprint review involves the client; in DevOps, success might be measured by system telemetry and user experience in production.
Tools and automation: Agile itself is tool-agnostic; it often uses project management tools (like Jira or Trello for tracking stories) and emphasizes human collaboration. DevOps heavily involves automation tools and infrastructure. For example, DevOps toolchains include version control, CI servers, automated test frameworks, deployment scripts, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), cloud infrastructure, and monitoring services. While an Agile process can be implemented even in a traditional environment, DevOps relies on automating as much of the pipeline as possible (builds, tests, deployments, environment provisioning). This automation aligns with Agile's goal of frequent delivery by removing manual bottlenecks, but it extends beyond development into ops.
Success metrics: Agile measures success primarily by the delivery of working software that meets customer needs. Agile teams often track velocity (how many story points delivered in a sprint), customer satisfaction, and product quality. DevOps measures success via operational metrics: for example, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, recovery time from failures, and defect escape rates. In other words, Agile asks "are we building the right product for the customer?" while DevOps asks "are we moving fast and reliably from code to customer?" An Agile team might celebrate hitting a sprint goal, whereas a DevOps team celebrates achieving zero downtime during an update or increasing deployment speed.
These differences show that Agile and DevOps operate on different planes. Agile is about development methodology, and DevOps is about delivery pipeline and culture. Next, we summarize these points in a comparison table for clarity.
Comparison table: Agile vs DevOps
| Aspect | Agile | DevOps |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Focused on software development process (planning, coding, designing features). Often limited to Dev team's activities. | Covers end-to-end delivery (development and operations). Encompasses code, infrastructure, deployment, and monitoring. |
| Primary goal | Rapid iteration in development to adapt to change and deliver customer value incrementally. | Continuous delivery of software to production with high velocity and stability. |
| Team composition | Small, cross-functional dev team (devs, QA, product owner). Operations typically handled by a separate team. | Cross-department team blending dev, QA, ops (and sometimes security) into one unit responsible for the full lifecycle. |
| Approach | Uses frameworks like Scrum (sprints, backlogs, daily stand-ups) or Kanban. Adaptive planning, frequent customer feedback, and iterative improvement. | Emphasizes culture & automation (no rigid framework). Practices include CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure as code, frequent deployments. Collaboration across roles is key rather than a specific project management process. |
| Release cycle | Iterative – features are developed in cycles (e.g. 2-week sprints) and potentially released at end of iteration. Release timing can be at iteration boundaries. | Continuous – aims for ongoing integration and deployment. Software releases can happen daily or on-demand, whenever code is ready (often through automated pipelines). |
| Feedback focus | External feedback from customers or stakeholders at review stages to ensure the product meets needs. Adjustments made in next sprint. | Internal feedback from systems and teams – e.g. monitoring, automated test results, and ops feedback. Quick detection of issues in production and rapid fixes (DevOps encourages continuous feedback loops). |
| Key metrics | Customer satisfaction, team velocity, product quality (working software delivered). Success = meeting the iteration's acceptance criteria and business value. | Deployment frequency, change lead time, system uptime, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). Success = fast, reliable deliveries and operational excellence (e.g. high automation test pass rates, low failure rate). |
| Quality assurance | Quality is ensured via frequent testing within sprints and customer validation. Agile encourages built-in quality but often still relies on manual QA or separate testing phases within iterations. | Quality is ensured via automation and early bug detection – extensive CI testing, automated code scans, monitoring in production. DevOps practices catch issues earlier (shift-left testing) and use tooling to maintain quality continuously. |
| Culture & philosophy | Adaptive, change-welcoming culture – embraces changing requirements, close team communication (e.g. daily stand-ups). Primarily a development philosophy (originating from Agile Manifesto values). | Collaborative, accountability-sharing culture – developers and ops collaborate closely, breaking silos. Embraces the "Dev + Ops" mindset that "the team builds it and runs it." Often seen as an extension of Agile principles into operations (DevOps emerged from agile concepts around 2009). |
Are Agile and DevOps the same?
It's a common question to ask: are Agile and DevOps the same? The short answer is no. Agile and DevOps are distinct concepts – Agile is about how developers work and DevOps is about how the organization delivers and operates software. Agile doesn't inherently include operations, and DevOps is not a project management framework. In fact, treating "Agile vs DevOps" as a direct competition is misleading because they address different stages and aspects of the software lifecycle. One industry source puts it succinctly: it's "unfair to compare agile vs DevOps as if they are competing methodologies", since they actually "complement each other beautifully when used together." In other words, Agile and DevOps are not mutually exclusive – you can (and often should) use both in tandem.
Is Agile or DevOps better?
Framing it as "Agile vs DevOps – which is better?" misses the point that they serve different purposes. Agile excels at speeding up and managing the development of software (making sure you're building the right product through iterative refinement). DevOps excels at speeding up the delivery and maintenance of software (getting that product efficiently and reliably to the users). Organizations do not need to choose one over the other as a winner. In fact, many successful teams start with Agile and then adopt DevOps practices to further accelerate delivery once Agile is in place. Conversely, teams might embrace DevOps tooling and culture and then incorporate Agile frameworks for planning their work. Neither is "better" in isolation – the best results often come when Agile and DevOps are used together, leveraging the strengths of both.
Using Agile and DevOps together
Rather than seeing Agile and DevOps as competitors, modern software organizations see them as complementary. Agile's principles of adaptive planning, close collaboration, and frequent delivery dovetail with DevOps principles of continuous integration, automation, and close collaboration between dev and ops. In practice, many teams use Agile methodologies within a DevOps culture. For example, a company might have Scrum teams (following Agile practices for development) while also implementing a DevOps toolchain for CI/CD, automated testing, and cloud deployments. The Agile teams plan and build in sprints, and thanks to DevOps automation, each increment can be integrated and released to production quickly. As one source notes, you don't have to pit them against each other: "You can choose to implement agile instead of DevOps (or vice versa), but they're commonly used together as they both support similar goals and processes." DevOps can be viewed as an extension of Agile beyond the code – taking the agile mindset of rapid iteration and applying it to infrastructure and release processes.
In hybrid approaches, Agile and DevOps roles might overlap. You might have an Agile product owner defining the features and priorities, and a DevOps engineer ensuring the pipeline delivers those features to users continuously. The methodologies reinforce each other: Agile ensures the team is building the right things in an efficient way, while DevOps ensures those things get delivered continuously and reliably. Organizations like Facebook, Google, and others have demonstrated that combining Agile development practices with a DevOps culture of automation leads to the fastest innovation cycles.
Importantly, adopting both requires a cultural shift. Teams must embrace not only Agile values (openness to change, collaboration) but also DevOps values (shared responsibility, no blame, automation-first mindset). When done right, Agile and DevOps together can shorten development and deployment cycles dramatically, without compromising quality.
Tooling and automation (Code reviews with Graphite)
Both Agile and DevOps rely on feedback and continuous improvement – and tooling plays a big role in enabling that. In an Agile-DevOps environment, practices like code review are critical for quality and knowledge sharing. Code reviews align with Agile's emphasis on collaboration (e.g. peer reviews in each sprint) and are often a gate in DevOps CI pipelines (ensuring code meets standards before merge). Modern tools can make code reviews faster and more effective, blending into the iterative and automated workflows.
One such tool is Graphite, a platform focused on streamlining the code review process. Graphite introduces an innovative "stacked changes" model that lets developers break large feature work into smaller dependent changes that can be reviewed and merged independently. This granular approach to code reviews prevents context-switching and makes reviews more manageable – which is invaluable in fast-paced Agile iterations. Graphite also integrates with popular version control (GitHub) to fit into existing workflows. By refining the code review process itself, Graphite brings clarity and efficiency for development teams, helping them maintain velocity without sacrificing thorough review.
In addition, Graphite leverages automation and AI, aligning with DevOps ideals. For example, Graphite's AI-powered reviewer, Diamond, uses Anthropic's Claude model to automatically catch bugs and suggest improvements in pull requests. This has led to impressive results – Graphite achieved a 40× faster pull request feedback loop, cutting review times from about 1 hour down to 90 seconds. Such rapid feedback is transformative: it means developers get near-instant code review comments, fix issues promptly, and merge changes faster. In an Agile context, that keeps the sprint on schedule; in a DevOps context, it keeps the continuous delivery pipeline flowing with minimal human bottlenecks. Graphite's tooling thus exemplifies how automation and smart tools can bolster both Agile and DevOps: by facilitating collaboration (peer reviews) and automating quality checks, it helps teams ship code faster and with confidence.
Conclusion
Agile vs DevOps is not an "either/or" choice – it's more about the intersection of two spheres. Agile is about building the software right (through adaptive planning and iterative development), while DevOps is about building the software fast and reliably (through automated delivery and operations). When we ask whether they're complementary or competing, the evidence strongly suggests they are complementary. Agile and DevOps share common goals (deliver value faster, with quality) and when combined, they reinforce each other's strengths. Agile provides the discipline and customer focus to make sure you're developing valuable software, and DevOps provides the automation and collaborative culture to get that software deployed continuously. As one article noted, it's unnecessary to pit one against the other – used together, "agile and DevOps complement each other beautifully".
In summary, successful software teams often adopt Agile practices and DevOps practices in harmony. Agile answers "what is agile development?" – it's about flexibility and iteration in creation. DevOps answers how to go from code to running service quickly and consistently. The real question isn't "Agile or DevOps, which is better?" but rather how to harness both. By doing so, organizations can achieve the holy grail of software engineering: rapid innovation (thanks to Agile) with rapid and stable delivery (thanks to DevOps). The result is a streamlined development lifecycle from idea to production, supported by a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement – truly the best of both worlds.