Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Are DevOps, Agile, and Lean IT the Same Thing? (zdnet.com)
ZDNet writes:
There have been three great movements shaping the information technology landscape. There is Agile, which emphasizes collaboration in software development; Lean IT, which promotes delivering software faster, better and cheaper; and DevOps, which seeks to align software development with continuous delivery...
These three movements have their own advocates, methodologies and terminology. But when you think about Agile, Lean IT and Agile, aren't these all the same thing, essentially? They all have the same goals, which is to deliver high-quality software on a continuous basis, collaboratively. Is it time to chuck the terminology and semantics and bring these three activities under the same roof?
Their article cites "advocates" -- two authors who have both written books about Lean It -- who are pushing for the concepts to all be brought together into a single mold. But it'd be interesting to get some opinions and real-world anecdotes from Slashdot's readers. So leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Are DevOps, Agile, and Lean IT the same thing?
These three movements have their own advocates, methodologies and terminology. But when you think about Agile, Lean IT and Agile, aren't these all the same thing, essentially? They all have the same goals, which is to deliver high-quality software on a continuous basis, collaboratively. Is it time to chuck the terminology and semantics and bring these three activities under the same roof?
Their article cites "advocates" -- two authors who have both written books about Lean It -- who are pushing for the concepts to all be brought together into a single mold. But it'd be interesting to get some opinions and real-world anecdotes from Slashdot's readers. So leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Are DevOps, Agile, and Lean IT the same thing?
Lean IT is about delivering quickly and cheaply, Agile about delivering high value compared to the costs, devops about taking responsibility for your work. If you start with one of these methods and take it to its logical conclusions, you'll end up with something that isn't very far from the others.
The idea that you can start with a mishmash of all three is probably not productive - there's a kind of learning journey you have to go through - but I'm willing to change my mind if somebody delivers proof.
They are not all the same thing, but they have components which are similar, like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. DevOps is the result of Lean IT. If you need to make things such as release cycles go faster, then you will end up with automation of manual and repetitive tasks, hence DevOps. Lean IT is largely about reducing waste. So if you reduce the size of the development cycle, you reduce the likelihood of a large amount waste occurring. From that comes Agile, small bite-size chucks of work. Although lean IT is not just about development.
Agile is a project management paradigm.
Devops is a software *delivery* paradigm.
Lean IT is an accounting paradigm.
Agile is usually in contrast to a waterfall model. Agile has quick iterations where things can change whilst waterfall has one large iteration which hopefully ends with a delivered product.
Devops is the application of development tools to managing operations. This then paved the way for things like continuous integration, automated testing and deployments, cloud infrastructure, infrastructure as code, continuous delivery etc etc i.e. operations driven by code.
Lean IT is the is the elimination of waste.
You can implement devops practices with both Agile and waterfall. Devops doesn't rely on Agile's iterative premise of essentially not knowing what you're building until it's built. If you're doing waterfall and youve come up with all the requirements before hand, written Z notation or whatever to define behaviour, front loaded the work to complete all the test plans before the code is written, why not run CI to do automated testing and deployment as the code is written?
If Lean It is the elimination of waste, why does a devops environment have to be lean? Why can't I over provision cloud or physical infrastructure and just have it sit idly by doing nothing whilst running perfect, by the book, Agile project management and Devops takes place? What does the elimination of waste have to do with Agile or waterfall style project management? Neither Agile or Devops has the goal of eliminating waste, they have goals of delivering working code.
It could be said that Agile has a goal of not writing code that doesn't need to be written but the reality of that is when doing iterative sprints often because of the model, not knowing exactly what the customer wants for instance, you're going to end up rewriting code upon discovery that your assumptions were wrong. That's waste.
All three run together beautifully and there's plenty of cross over but to say they are the same or even have the same goals is naive.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
The 'devops' role is almost by definition a generalist. The best people that typically fill it are good enough to be developers in their own right, great enough to be systems administrators, good at QA, databases and a host of related disciplines. It's almost the inevitable by-product of experienced system administrators who know code and wrote code to get rid of repetitive tasks, at scale.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
"Agile" - Bullshit term (fake nown) stemming from the very real term "agile software development". The correct nown would be "agility" or "agility in software development" or "agile development". This is usually achieved by focusing on strict procedures and a clearly defined and limited set of tools and technologies in order to automate most tasks and be ready to quickly react to clients who don't know what they want to somehow know exactly what it may cost and when it needs to be finished. This is usually the case in the broader industry of web software development. This is why Scrum (offering those exact traits) is often used synonymous with "agility in software development" although it's just one method for agility. Albeit - done correctly - a very usefull and effective one.
"DevOps" - DevOps is the merging of administration and development through automation, standardization and ever increasing performance of computers and networks. Administrative tasks and development tasks move closer together, as both take less work and offer more enablement for IT workers. The line between development, administration and maintenance blurs, hence the portmanteau term "DevOps" - as in "development and operations". These tasks are also moved together because in the SaaS world product lifecycles are increasing shorter or in some cases perpetually changing, requireing IT experts to switch between development, maintenance and administrative tasks on a hourly basis.
"Lean IT" is a broader term describing the trimming down of IT in companies and ventures due to the ever increasing power and versatility of hard- and software. Tasks usually left to special computers and software are now increasingly being handled by off-the-shelf hardware, such as headless desktop computers serving as utility servers, upper-range consumer-grade NAS devices as essential fileservers or cheap generic web-based groupware for mission-critical document management. Stuff like this can nowadays also often be easily moved on to SaaS (aka "Cloud") offerings and back again with enough reliability and fault-tolerance that the risk associated with such an infrastructure shift is justifiable. IT gets leaner and cheaper, with less requirement for highly trained staff. A good example these days is the demise of the on-premise self-hosted MS Exchange groupware/mailserver that is replaced by web-based solutions or subscriptions purchased directly from MS and putting many high-earning MS Exchange experts out of jobs.
One could argue that all three concepts exist only because of ever increasing efficiency in digital technology, but the terms itself do describe different things.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The reality is that 'devops' has achieved critical mass as a buzzword, so any particular interpretation of what that means is both correct and incorrect in the current reality.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They all belong into the same box. The one where a consultant gets a lot of money to teach you something that makes you more productive if you don't use it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A good manager can figure out who isn't getting work done in a timely fashion without dragging everyone into daily meetings that they'll all hate.