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?

Comments

No

[gweihir]

But they all stem (in part) from the same root-cause: A slow realization that IT personnel is routinely not very good and that you would need far less IT people if the were really good. Of course, the usual implementation does it completely wrong by paying peanuts and then being surprised when they get monkeys.

Re:No

[Kjella]

But they all stem (in part) from the same root-cause: A slow realization that IT personnel is routinely not very good and that you would need far less IT people if the were really good. Of course, the usual implementation does it completely wrong by paying peanuts and then being surprised when they get monkeys.

Meh, sometimes you pay very expensive consultants and you still get shit. In my opinion there's way too much focus on the process and far too little focus on the actual output. And by output I don't mean the finished result, but from each step in the requirements -> solutions -> systems -> functions -> code chain. It doesn't matter that much if you're trying to cook and eat the elephant in one piece (waterfall), chunks (iterative waterfall), timeboxes (agile) or nibbles (continuous delivery) if it's still raw or spoiled.

I know everything is much easier in hindsight but every time we fail we should backtrack and see where we actually failed. Like, is this a code error, a low level design issue like a missing function, a high level design issue like the overall data flow is wrong, is it a requirement that was implied but not properly expressed? And then go back and see when we did this, why didn't we see it? Yes, some issues and needs you only learn about by actually running into the problem but a lot of other things are simply "we didn't think this through" and maybe we should.

I'd say no

[Idimmu Xul]

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.

Re:Yes and No

[Idimmu Xul]

Yes and no.

Specialising is often necessary due to hiring and experience constraints.

You can't be immediately good at everything but the project needs code, databases, networking and infrastructure.

Sure you can get code off the ground by a beginner who's taken a Udemy course and managed to get something up and working on Heroku and Mongo cloud, but what do you do when the platform grows, you need to move to AWS or/then physical infrastructure to reduce costs and scale.

You want the same guy to learn AWS security policies or hire in for it?

AWS costs have spiralled. You've now moved to the datacenter, you've got some dedicated infrastructure provided to you in a VLAN via a switch the datacenter manages. You expect the same developer to know the ins and outs of the operating system, kernel tuning, scaling the service horizontally and the database too?

Now you've leveled up. You own racks, you're running redundant BGP services for peering, you're managing your own switches with their own VLANs, you've got keepalived rewriting MAC addresses to reroute packets between machines.

Same guy for complete company life cycle? Or can we hire specialists?

Yes, of course

[93 Escort Wagon]

”Are DevOps, Agile, and Lean IT the Same Thing?”

Yes, they are all the same thing. They are buzzwords.