So what is causing the DevOps community to say they are the next step from Agile. Could it simply be that infrastructure and operations are not explicitly mentioned enough in the Agile principles?
Lets look at some of the Agile principles that I feel promote practices of DevOps.
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
This principle talks about continuous delivery to satisfy the customer. The customer is not going to be satisfied if it is running on a developers machine so delivery here must be out in to the real world and therefore on suitable infrastructure. Should the term software be changed to software and infrastructure?
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. This principle is about daily collaboration and just stating developers and business may be limiting. Testers, UX designers etc have had to live with this for a while and operations are certainly not included. May be changing the term developers to "delivery teams" to be more inclusive would help.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. It depends on your definition of "environment and support". For me this includes the right tools, dev and test infrastructure and necessary expertise to maintain and develop these. This is a key part of DevOps.
Working software is the primary measure of progress. As mentioned in the first principle the same applies here. If our measure of progress and therefore success is working software. The delivery team can not be progressing if they don't have delivered and working in front of the users. Therefore operations are needed to make this principle be fulfilled.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Again should this principle be more inclusive. As development teams ramp up without operations or DevOps practices, there is often pressure as they want to release much more frequently. This can become unsustainable for operation teams, in my experience this often one of the key drivers in an organisation that has been doing Agile to start talking about DevOps.
Agile and Lean should not just be about the development and QA team working with the business. To fulfil the principles it should be about getting all the necessary people working in a team with constant collaboration to deliver working software. That software can't be working unless it is deployed on suitable infrastructure and systems to support it. The Lean; build, measure and learn feedback loop can't be fulfilled unless you have the supporting infrastructure and skills in your team to collect the data. The business can't react to what they learn if they can't quickly release changes to the customer. To do that you need business, designers, developers, testers and operations. They need to be working collaboratively and all working together to deliver the software to the customer. They need to take on DevOps practices such as treating infrastructure as code, automated testing and automated releases to be able meet the Agile and Lean principles.
It may come down to your interpretation of the Agile principles and how you define terms such as "working software", "continuous delivery", "developers". Personally I don't feel there is anything particularly evolutionary about DevOps, depending on what definition you use. But it could be argued that the Agile principles could be tweaked to be more inclusive of operations when talking about developers and more explicit that working software also includes the underlying infrastructure and systems to support it.
What do you think? Could a some minor changes to the Agile principles show that DevOps practices are just part of the Agile principles or is there a fundamental mind shift from Agile to DevOps?
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