What are the differences between CI/CD, Agile, and DevOps?

 

Agile focuses on highlighting change and processes while ensuring that delivery is accelerated. CI/CD focuses on highlighting tools and software-defined life cycles while emphasizing on automation. DevOps focuses on highlighting roles and culture while emphasizing on responsiveness. All these three renowned approaches play a crucial role in software development and project management activities. In this article, you will get to know the differences between agile, CI/CD and DevOps.

Agile practices and development:

Process barriers are removed and developers, customers and stakeholders collaborate on accelerating delivery. The constancy of change is highlighted by this development model. It also shows that software producers may not have an adequate plan to successfully develop, conceive and deliver high-quality software.

The fundamentals of agile development revolve around responding to (rather than resisting) change, close collaboration with customers, rapidly producing working software, empowering professionals and removing process barriers.

 

Continuous Integration (CI)/ Continuous Delivery (CD):

CI is a software engineering practice where team members’ work is integrated with increased frequency. To keep up with the CI practice, teams focus on integrating on an hourly or at least daily basis, thereby approaching integration that happens “continuously.”

Integration was considered to be a cost-consuming activity; hence, automation tools are emphasized by CI through which developing and testing activities can take place accordingly. This, in turn, helps in the attainment of a software-defined life cycle. The build and integration effort are dropped when CI becomes successful and integration efforts can be detected by teams as quickly as possible.

The purpose of CI is to build and test, whereas the purpose of CD is to package and deploy. The software can be built, configured and packaged by teams practicing CD and then the deployment can be orchestrated in such a way that it can be unconfined to production in a software-defined manner (high automation and low cost).

Agile development is directly facilitated by high-functioning CI/CD practices. Because of this, there are more opportunities for customers to experience and provide feedback on the change.

 

The relevance of DevOps:

The negative impact of stovepiping and overspecialization roles in an organization through which production issues are prevented can be avoided by the DevOps platform. The barriers between Development and Operations are broken down by DevOps based organizations by cross-training each team to get familiar and skilled in new skills.

This will help each others to participate and appreciate each other’s tasks leading to more frequent communication and high-quality collaboration.

 

The strategic role of CI CD in DevOps:

CI is the first process through which engineering teams start working. The package, orchestration and configuration that is necessary for software development is focused by DevOps platform, which in turn creates a reliable Continuous Delivery (CD) practice. Hence, the strategic implementation of CI CD in DevOps can in turn help in scaling up agile development practices.

 

Differences between Agile, CI/CD and DevOps:

Agile	CI/CD	DevOps
The constant need for development and testing is highlighted by agile methodology throughout the software development process	Automation tools are monitored through CI CD practice for reliably changing the codebase	The Development and Operations team work collaboratively rather than in silos
It is a project management approach that strives to bridge the gap between the software requirements of the customer and the testing/development team	DevOps practitioners adopt the workflow practices of CI/CD. Other practices within the DevOps philosophy include IaC, microservices etc.	The gap between the IT operations team and the developers/testers is bridged by DevOps
Project management efficiency is increased through agile tools	The primary focus of CI/CD tools is to automate the Continuous Integration process	The collaboration and communication between the IT team, developers and product managers are enhanced by DevOps tools

 

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing Agile testing or DevOps testing for your specific organization, then do get connected with a leading software testing services company that will provide you with well-defined testing solutions that are in line with your project specific requirements. 

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.