Teams have many choices when practicing Agile: Scrum, XP, Kanban, Crystal, Lean production, scale Agile, etc. The most popular agile development method is Scrum. Because of this, most people have a stereotype that Agile is Scrum, and implementing Agile is applying Scrum methods.

Arising after the agile enterprise culture idea, practices and tools at a suit, can improve the organization’s ability to high speed delivery of applications and services, and compared with the traditional software development and infrastructure management process, can help organizations to develop faster and improve products, also gradually become a development team cohesion and cement operations teams. Instead, people are often limited to one mental dilemma: Scrum or DevOps for team transformation?

Here, it is necessary to correct people’s misunderstanding. First, agile is not Scrum. Agile is a software development movement whose founders are trying to help people in the industry by thinking about software development, methodology, and organization in a new and more agile way. Scrum, as a methodology, is not a detailed operational specification, but a set of behavioral frameworks on which teams formulate appropriate iterative tasks according to their own team’s actual situation.

DevOps doesn’t just focus on the development phase; it focuses on the entire system, facilitating the flow of value end-to-end. The flow of value is not limited to a single stage, from customer requirements to development to delivery of customer results. Each unit of the whole system is complementary to each other, so the change of one part will affect the other parts, in order to make the value flow out smoothly, it needs the cooperation of each unit of the system.

As a result, when people don’t know Scrum or DevOps, they often fall into the trap of choosing between them. In fact, Scrum and DevOps are not in conflict. In nature, Scrum is more infrastructure oriented, while DevOps is more cultural.

On the other hand, Scrum and DevOps are the parts and the whole: Scrum focuses on deliverables at the end of each sprint, while DevOps focuses on the whole operation, continuity and continuous delivery of construction, development, operations, etc.

The next step in a Scrum team, which includes architects, analysts, salespeople, and so on in addition to the developers on the original Scrum team, is how to link the functional members together. Some teams that are aware of this problem are seeking DevOps support to address the drawbacks of a single Scrum methodology that focuses only on the development phase.

1. Continuous delivery

The continuous delivery concept of DevOps was introduced into Scrum, emphasizing that the completion of each sprint should be targeted at product increments.

  • First, during the sprint, the Scrum Master does not create a detailed sprint plan, but only plans for the first few days of the sprint, and then flexibly changes the plan as the work progresses during the sprint.
  • Secondly, Scrum meetings should be held daily to synchronize team members’ plans and improve collaboration efficiency.
  • Finally, at the end of the sprint, the team needs to hold a retrospective meeting to summarize the work done during the sprint, reflect on the shortcomings of the sprint and what to look out for in order to change the overall direction of the team for the next iteration.

During the Sprint, the Scrum team is constantly learning, getting feedback, and trying to improve and produce as much product as possible into the delivery environment. The Scrummaster then determines the goals for the next sprint based on the achievement of the goals in this phase, again taking care during this phase to minimize human intervention and thus reduce the release cycle.

2. Amplify feedback

Scrum teams get timely feedback on the results of the previous sprint through acceptance meetings, retrospectives, and daily Scrum to keep team members abreast of their work progress. Unlike Scrum alone, Scrum with DevOps already accepts sprint results in production, and the acceptance criteria is no longer a single performance test, but a multi-point review of the product, deployment architecture, marketing, etc., to plan for the next Sprint.

There are many ways to expand feedback, but in general the first step is how to improve productivity. There are several approaches: Pair programming can be used to increase productivity and deliver the product into the environment as much as possible. Code specifications can also be unified to reduce additional costs: when the team has a good and uniform code specification, it can effectively avoid the risk of team work stagnation caused by the absence of a member, and it can also improve the readability of the code, thus improving work efficiency and broadening feedback.

Scrum’s ritualistic feel is often expressed in iteration planning meetings, daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives, and so on. DevOps focuses on delivering value quickly and consistently throughout the value stream, the rapid flow of value that requires the participation of everyone in the product release process; At the same time, by automating the “software delivery” and “architecture change” processes, human intervention is gradually eliminated, making it faster, more frequent, and more reliable to build, test, and distribute software.

DevOps culture advocates “shared responsibility”, where all members work together to ensure that the product is valuable during launch, so applying DevOps on top of the Scrum framework helps the Scrum team learn and innovate.

This article is from agile development by yanruiyu.

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