Putting aside the accuracy of the NYT's definition, what's confusing to me is...why even mention "DevOps" in the first place, as if it were relevant elsewhere i

Putting aside the accuracy of the NYT's definition, what's confusing to me is...why even mention "DevOps" in the first place, as if it were relevant elsewhere in the story, or as if it were something the general readership would know enough about to use as a point of reference (which I'm assuming they don't)? Remove the reference to "DevOps", and you have a concise enough explanation of "so-called agile software development" and a cleaner paragraph overall: > One solution favored by Winter during his recent tenure was agile development, a popular software engineering methodology used for quickly testing and evaluating features for new products. (Since software teams in the U.S. government, such as 18F, also use agile dev these days, so it's not particularly relevant to point out its popularity in the "private sector")