This chapter is intended to provide more insight into the background against which GitLab has arisen. The product was literally created to help solve a number of problems that the Agile movement experienced. We will talk about the history of development methodologies and the rise of Agile as the dominant way to develop software. The Agile methodologies spilled over to the traditional operations department, which then led to the DevOps movement. Finally, we will summarize a number of tools that are part of the DevOps way of working.

In this chapter, we will cover following topics:

• The Agile Manifesto
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• The DevOps movement
• The toolchain