Agile methodology has done much to improve the speed of development teams, but it doesn’t address the performance of the other groups involved in the process of bringing software to market — like operations, testing, security, etc. DevOps is an approach that helps solve some of these problems by encouraging better collaboration between the development and operations departments.
The DevOps community is starting to develop best practices related to the approach. In addition, open source tools like Puppet and Chef are helping to bridge the divide between server administrators and application developers.